I’m posting this to see if anyone has hit the same issue and/or knows the authoritative storage for Claude Code session history. Problem After upgrading my 2024 MacBook Pro to macOS Tahoe 26.3 and rebooting, Claude Code + VS Code went sideways: • VS Code terminals started failing (“Restarting the terminal because the connection to the shell process was lost…” / terminals not opening / flashing cursor) • Claude Code sometimes crashed in VS Code terminals with exit code 127 (command not found) even though claude worked in macOS Terminal. • After cleaning up PATH and removing conflicting installs, claude runs again — but Claude Code’s Resume Session UI now only shows 1–2 sessions, and the rest of my history appears gone. I relied on those sessions heavily (months of work, lots of project context). What I’ve checked / evidence • ~/.claude/history.jsonl exists (~833KB). I parsed it: • timestamp range: 2025-10-04 → 2026-02-19 • but a lot of entries appear to have missing “pasted block” content (placeholders / empty extracted text). • ~/.claude/projects/…/sessions-index.json exists but seems basically empty/corrupted: • only 1 sessions-index.json • it reports 1 session with a bad timestamp (epoch-ish / 1969) and no title. • ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude-code-sessions/ exists but only contains a single UUID folder with 3 local_*.json files — nowhere near “all sessions.” I also have tons of ~/.claude/debug/*.txt logs still present (lots of large files). My suspicion The OS upgrade + VS Code terminal crash caused Claude Code’s session resume index to reset/overwrite, so the resume picker can’t see anything even though some artifacts still exist. Questions for the community
- What is the authoritative location Claude Code uses for “Resume Session” history on macOS? 2. Has anyone successfully rebuilt/reindexed sessions after corruption? Is there a hidden command/repair? 3. Does Claude Desktop store this in Electron IndexedDB/LevelDB, and if so, what folder/file(s)? 4. Any known interaction with macOS Tahoe (26.x) upgrades and app sandbox/permissions breaking local session stores? If you’ve recovered sessions or know where the true session DB lives, I’d appreciate pointers. I can post directory listings (sanitized) if helpful. submitted by /u/teshpnyc
Originally posted by u/teshpnyc on r/ClaudeCode