Sessions silently deleted without user action
Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 0 comments · opened Aug 20, 2026
Description
Named sessions are being silently deleted from ~/.claude/projects/<project>/ without any user action. The .jsonl files and their associated subdirectories are completely removed — not moved to Trash, no backup available.
Steps to Reproduce
- Create and name multiple sessions (
/name hardware-tokens, etc.) - Use them over days/weeks
- Run
claude -rto resume — some previously named sessions no longer appear - Confirm files are gone from
~/.claude/projects/<encoded-path>/
Expected Behavior
Sessions should only be deleted when the user explicitly deletes them (e.g., via /delete or manual removal).
Actual Behavior
Sessions disappear without any user action. In my case, at least 3 session files were deleted between conversations:
9fa305c6-6fc8-4454-ae45-26221770a976.jsonla1eb610b-4d4d-4f08-8c28-34422aa42324.jsonlc4923c50-c490-425a-be7a-7379ea16d3a5.jsonl
One of these was a named session ("hardware-tokens") with significant conversation history.
Environment
- macOS (Darwin 25.6.0)
- Claude Code CLI v2.1.236
- Files are not in macOS Trash
- No Time Machine local snapshots available
- No other process or cron job managing these files
Impact
Loss of session history and context for long-running workstreams. Named sessions are used to maintain continuity across days/weeks of work.