Recovering Claude Code sessions from history.jsonl after index corruption

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0600

I still have every email I’ve sent and received since 1998. I don’t lose data. So when Claude Code stopped resuming sessions for a project I’d used daily for months, I didn’t think “oh well.” I thought “where did it go.”

The project directory still existed in ~/.claude/projects/. There was even a sessions-index.json in it. But the actual per-session JSONL files — the ones that contain the conversation data — were gone. Every one of them. The index was a catalog pointing at empty shelves.

Incident-Response on ferkakta.dev

Recovering Claude Code sessions from history.jsonl after index corruption