Claude Code quietly deletes conversations after 30 days
A developer lost old Claude Code transcripts to the default 30-day retention setting. Raising cleanupPeriodDays in settings.json keeps them.
Credits
- HN submitter mieubrisse Source ↗
- HN commenter data-ottawa Source ↗
Earliest dated source:
Claude Code deletes old transcripts after 30 days by default. Raise cleanupPeriodDays in settings.json to keep them.
The full story
Claude Code deletes conversation transcripts older than 30 days by default, every time it starts. Developers found out the hard way: one shared the warning after losing transcripts, and another discovered every session before 6 March was gone just as they wanted to compare against an analysis from December.
To keep transcripts, raise cleanupPeriodDays in settings.json.
How it was done
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Hacker News: Claude Code deletes conversations after 30 daysHN submitter: mieubrissePosted
The Hacker News warning, linking the GitHub issue.
- Hacker News: I was going to do a deep analysis on this, and then I noticed that Claude Code deleted allHN commenter: data-ottawaPosted
A second developer who lost months of sessions.