Claude Code deletes local session transcripts after 30 days by default. Once a transcript is gone, claude --resume can’t open the session, and nothing on disk says what I decided in it.
The oldest transcript on this machine is 27 days old:
$ find ~/.claude/projects -name '*.jsonl' -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td\n' | sort | head -1
2026-08-21
To keep the transcripts longer, set cleanupPeriodDays in ~/.claude/settings.json:
{ "cleanupPeriodDays": 365 }Grepping those JSONL files is still a poor way to find a decision I have forgotten. mempalace indexes the transcripts into a local search index:
mempalace mine ~/.claude/projects/ --mode convos
mempalace search "cleanupPeriodDays"Its Claude Code plugin hooks add each new session to that index as it runs, so the index outlives the 30-day cleanup.
