If your Claude Code / Claude Desktop session list went blank — after a crash, a disk-full event, an update, or for no obvious reason — stop before you assume the history is gone. In almost every case the conversations are still fully on disk; only the app's index of them broke. Here is how to confirm that and get them back. Every session is written as a line-delimited JSON transcript here:
- macOS / Linux:
~/.claude/projects/<encoded-project-path>/<session-id>.jsonl - Windows:
%USERPROFILE%\.claude\projects\<encoded-project-path>\<session-id>.jsonlEach.jsonlfile is one session. Each line is one event (your prompts, the assistant's replies, timestamps, the working directory, a summary). I confirmed on my own install that these files hold the complete session — every turn, not a truncated index. The sidebar / session list you see in the UI is just a derived index (e.g. Claude Desktop builds one in IndexedDB). When that index breaks, the sidebar goes blank **even though the transcrip