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Beware, Claude Code deletes >30 day old transcripts. Anthropic won't fix it

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Re: Beware, Claude Code deletes >30 day old transcripts. Anthropic won't fix it

#11

Post by john01dav »

preciousoo wrote: post #7

Isn’t “Anthropic won’t fix it” a little sensational for barely month old issue with little activity(two upvotes, one of which is me), in backlog of 5k+? Agree that it’s a real issue that need fixing however

They claim that they can automate development, so their backlog should really be ~0. /hj

Re: Beware, Claude Code deletes >30 day old transcripts. Anthropic won't fix it

#13

Post by 8note »

midnitewarrior wrote: post #6

idk if it's broken. I think it's more like, "We don't want our harness to need to be able to interpret every version of our conversation format indefinitely."

i think more of a "we need to delete thinking traces off of customers devices, so our customers cant use them"

which makes anthropic on the whole a lot less trustworthy to have access to any machine

Re: Beware, Claude Code deletes >30 day old transcripts. Anthropic won't fix it

#14

Post by preciousoo »

8note wrote: post #9
preciousoo wrote: post #7

Isn’t “Anthropic won’t fix it” a little sensational for barely month old issue with little activity(two upvotes, one of which is me), in backlog of 5k+? Agree that it’s a real issue that need fixing however

"fix it" here is reverting their bad change

I just noticed that it’s a config option. Weird that it’s so short though, I can understand why it may be needed for users who spawn hundreds of sessions a day

Re: Beware, Claude Code deletes >30 day old transcripts. Anthropic won't fix it

#15

Post by Schiendelman »

pigeonwarz wrote: post #3

The best mitigation I've found against this is training Claude to collate what it does within the project dir, specifically a CLAUDE.md vision file and .claude/changelog that documents the changes it makes. The biggest pain point though is remembering to force it to do that between sessions (man is that contextual memory unreliable sometimes).

Oh yeah - it commonly doesn't update my BACKLOG.md after shipping something. It tends to catch itself on the next set of work, but sometimes I have it clean up based on recent commits.

Re: Beware, Claude Code deletes >30 day old transcripts. Anthropic won't fix it

#16

Post by ralferoo »

"Why this is more than an inconvenience. For paying users who treat their sessions as intellectual property — design reasoning, prompt history, hard-won context — this is silent, unconsented destruction of user-owned data. The transcripts are the user's record of their own thinking and work; deleting them by default, silently, with no recovery, inverts the expected ownership relationship. A 30-day default that quietly discards months of accumulated reasoning is a poor default for that audience, however reasonable it is for disk hygiene in the general case."

Those users would be wise to back those files up if they consider them valuable intellectual property. If they're important enough that you'd miss them after a disk failure, then they should have been being backed up already.

Re: Beware, Claude Code deletes >30 day old transcripts. Anthropic won't fix it

#17

Post by Evidlo »

There are several third party tools which can assist with transparently aggregating and archiving sessions across projects

Ccrider is the one I use: https://github.com/neilberkman/ccrider

Session backups live outside of ~.claude so are not deleted and can be resumed.

Re: Beware, Claude Code deletes >30 day old transcripts. Anthropic won't fix it

#19

Post by orphea »

preciousoo wrote: post #7

Isn’t “Anthropic won’t fix it” a little sensational for barely month old issue with little activity(two upvotes, one of which is me), in backlog of 5k+? Agree that it’s a real issue that need fixing however

  Isn’t “Anthropic won’t fix it” a little sensational
It's editorializing and against HN guidelines either way.

Re: Beware, Claude Code deletes >30 day old transcripts. Anthropic won't fix it

#20

Post by mwigdahl »

8note wrote: post #13
midnitewarrior wrote: post #6

idk if it's broken. I think it's more like, "We don't want our harness to need to be able to interpret every version of our conversation format indefinitely."

i think more of a "we need to delete thinking traces off of customers devices, so our customers cant use them" which makes anthropic on the whole a lot less trustworthy to have access to any machine

Except that those customers can access the traces for 30 days, and freely copy them at any point during that period? It's a usability issue at worst, not some anti-customer conspiracy.
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