[BUG] Cowork loses a session's home directory on VM restart, and the connected folder goes with it
Title: [BUG] Cowork loses a session's home directory on VM restart, and the connected folder goes with it
What's Wrong?
A Cowork session's home inside the VM does not survive a VM restart. When it goes, the connected
folder goes with it, and the app asks me to add the folder again in the middle of a task.
From ~/Library/Logs/Claude/coworkd.log on macOS 26 (Darwin 24.6.0), Claude desktop with SDK
binary 2.1.260:
[process] user rcw-01toqkmz1tbremcwdforbzyz should exist but doesn't,
attempting recovery from home directory
[process] recovery failed for user rcw-01toqkmz1tbremcwdforbzyz
(home directory /sessions/rcw-01toqkmz1tbremcwdforbzyz does not exist)That pair appears 30 times across 14 days between 27 April and 10 September 2026, and the days
line up with VM starts. The host disk was low on 10 September and was cleared, so that is ruled out.
This is the same fault as #24483, #24190 and #24549, all closed without a fix named. Two were
closed as duplicates and one for inactivity.
What Should Happen?
A session's home under /sessions/ survives a VM restart, or the app says the session is gone
and offers to start a new one with the same folder, rather than showing the folder as connected
while every tool call fails.
Steps to reproduce
- Start a Cowork session with a folder connected.
- Quit the desktop app, or let the VM restart.
- Reopen the session and send a prompt.
What I have tried
Restarting the Mac. Clearing disk space. Removing the folder's second entry from the app's
project list. Seven mails to support@anthropic.com since 6 September, every reply from the AI
agent, none from a person.