Where Does Claude Code Store Conversation History?

Claude Code stores your conversation history locally, as plain files, under ~/.claude/projects. Every session you have ever run is there — grouped by the project you ran it in, one file per conversation. Nothing lives on a server, which is good for privacy but means finding and reading an old session is on you. Here is exactly how the storage is laid out.

The short answer

Your sessions are in your home directory:

~/.claude/projects/

On macOS and Linux that expands to /Users/you/.claude/projects or /home/you/.claude/projects. On Windows it lives under your user profile folder. It is a hidden folder (the leading dot), so you may need to enable "show hidden files" in your file manager to see it.

How the folder is organised

Open ~/.claude/projects and you will see one subfolder per project you have used Claude Code in. Each subfolder is named after the working directory you launched Claude Code from, with the path flattened into a single name. So a project you ran in ~/code/my-app becomes its own folder, and every session you started there lands inside it.

Inside each project folder are the sessions themselves:

• One .jsonl file per session. Each file is a single conversation, named with that session's identifier.
• JSONL format — "JSON Lines", one JSON object per line. Each line is one event in the conversation: a message you sent, a reply from Claude, or a tool call and its result.

This layout is why your history is organised per project: every session you started in a given directory lives in that directory's folder — and it's why claude --resume and claude --continue only ever operate on the current directory's sessions, even if you pass --resume a specific session ID from elsewhere. There is no single built-in view that searches across everything, because your conversations are split across one folder per project on disk.

Reading a session file

Because the files are plain text, you can open any .jsonl file in a text editor to inspect it. Each line is valid JSON, so a tool like jq helps pull out just the parts you care about. To read a session as flowing text rather than raw objects, you would extract the message content line by line — the raw file interleaves your prompts and Claude's replies with tool calls and file contents, so it is denser than a clean chat transcript.

To search across all of them for a phrase you remember, ripgrep reads the nested folders quickly:

rg -i "the phrase you remember" ~/.claude/projects

Backing it up

Since your history is just a folder of files, backup is simple: copy ~/.claude/projects somewhere safe, and restore it by copying it back. A few things worth knowing:

• The files contain the full conversation, including file contents Claude read and command output. Treat a backup as sensitive — it can hold code, secrets, and paths from your projects.
• Deleting a project's folder removes those sessions from claude --resume, since the resume picker reads from these files.
• Moving or renaming a project directory means new sessions land in a new folder; the old sessions stay under the old folder name.

Making them searchable

Knowing where the files are is half the battle; reading them is the other half. Raw JSONL is fine for a one-off grep, but it is not how you want to browse your history day to day.

LLMnesia reads these session files and turns them into clean, searchable conversations — indexed locally, on your device, alongside your ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini chats. Point it at your ~/.claude/projects folder once (or let its optional background helper keep it in sync), and you can search every session by keyword, then reopen the one you want in the Claude Desktop app or resume it from the terminal. It indexes only your prompts and Claude's replies, leaving file reads, commands, and tool output out.