Claude Code silently deletes conversation transcripts after 30 days by default

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Claude Code users are reporting that the app is silently deleting conversation transcripts – yours may even already be gone if you don’t know to change a default setting that the platform never bothers to tell users about. Claude Code’s GitHub repo features multiple open issues from the past couple of months, as users of the coding tool are finding their conversation transcripts gone. The problem appears to come down to the cleanupPeriodDays configuration option, which defaults to 30 days and runs every time Claude Code starts up, wiping out any .jsonl file it finds that isn’t fresh enough. Anthropic suggested the blame lies with users for not checking the documentation, telling The Register that the 30-day erasure policy has been there since Claude's launch as a security measure, and is documented. "Keeping plain text transcripts of coding sessions on disk indefinitely creates real security and privacy risks, since they can contain source code, credentials, and other sensitive material," the company said in a statement. "The 30-day default balances the ability to resume recent work against not holding that data on disk longer than needed. This has been part of Claude Code's design since launch as a security measure." This might not be such a huge deal if Claude Code bothered to inform 8naware users that their 30-day-old conversations with the bot would be wiped out the next time they opened the application, or informed them that the setting exists. But users are saying that's not the case. “Cleanup runs out of the box with no install-time disclosure or first-run dialog,” GitHub user FTSBrand wrote in his original post, which has since become the issue of record. “Users who treat their conversation history as durable working knowledge are silently mistaken about the persistence model.” Another user in their own issue thread reports that code and git history for a project remained after the cleanup wipe, “but the reasoning trail - design discussions, debugging context, analysis - is gone.” “For research work that context is the artifact,” GitHub user joekhochstetter said. This cleanup feature appears to bypass any form of recovery, with no soft-deletion option, grace period, or option to restore. User reports also suggest there’s no log of what’s deleted either, leaving people with no way to confirm what’s been wiped after it happens. Moreover, one might assume that simply changing the retention period to a higher number would render the issue irrelevant, but several users say setting a large value for retention isn’t working properly. GitHub user ojura’s root cause analysis suggests that’s because deletion is keyed to a transcript’s mtime (modification time) rather than its actual last activity timestamp. "Because mtime is externally mutable, anything that touches it flips the outcome: a restore, a sync client, or a script that sets mtimes to a session's true (old) last-activity date makes a present session look old, and it is silently deleted on the next sweep,” ojura explained. The only solution in the thread is to ensure Claude Code transcripts are backed up, with several different iterations of such a workaround suggested. That hasn’t been enough to satisfy some Claude Coders - they want it fixed. “Backups are good hygiene, but they don't replace product-level disclosure/provenance for a destructive retention sweep,” writes GitHub user caioribeiroclw-pixel. ®