[FEATURE] Lost a full conversation to the silent 30-day cleanup — no warning, no opt-in, no recovery.

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

I just lost an entire Claude Code Desktop conversation because of the default cleanupPeriodDays = 30 behavior, and I want to add my voice to the people asking for this to change.

What happened on my end:

A session I cared about (17 completed turns of real work) silently had its transcript deleted after 30 days of inactivity.
The session still showed up in the Desktop sidebar, but clicking it just said "Session not found on disk" with only Import CLI / Archive / Delete options. The metadata (transcriptUnavailable: true) confirmed the app knew the transcript was already gone.
There was no warning before deletion, no prompt, no opt-in, and no way to recover it. My Windows File History only had snapshots from after the deletion, so the conversation is permanently lost.

I only found out this behavior existed after losing the data, by digging through ~/.claude/projects/ and the session JSON.

Proposed Solution

Make cleanup opt-in, or at minimum warn before deleting. Silently destroying user history by default is a surprising and destructive choice.
Notify the user (a one-time prompt or a visible setting during onboarding) that transcripts older than N days will be deleted, and let them change or disable it before anything is lost.
Don't leave ghost entries in the sidebar pointing to transcripts that were auto-deleted — either keep the data or remove the entry cleanly, but don't show a session that can't be opened.

Alternative Solutions

_No response_

Priority

Critical - Blocking my work

Feature Category

Configuration and settings

Use Case Example

_No response_

Additional Context

_No response_