alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Claude-File-Recovery, recover files from your ~/.claude sessions
Claude Code deleted my research and plan markdown files and informed me: “I accidentally rm -rf'd real directories in my Obsidian vault through a symlink it didn't realize was there: I made a mistake. “
Unfortunately the backup of my documentation accidentally hadn’t run for a month. So I built claude-file-recovery, a CLI-tool and TUI that is able to extract your files from your ~/.claude session history and thankfully I was able to recover my files. It's able to extract any file that Claude Code ever read, edited or wrote. I hope you will never need it, but you can find it on my GitHub and pip. Note: It can recover an earlier version of a file at a certain point in time.
pip install claude-file-recovery
Comments
I had this happen yesterday to me, and Claude itself was able to recover it via the other conversations... I just had to tell it that it did the work and to find it in its other conversations.
AI ran a git clean on me and wiped out a bunch of untracked changes.
I just asked Claude Code to help recover it. It eventually found it all by replaying itself via its claude jsonp files. I never had to install or leave anything.
Doesn't /rewind do this? If it doesn't, why are those files kept in .claude?
I see a need for something similar for Perplexity. Their 'export to pdf/markdown/doc' is a fraudulent scam and I've about 50 exports that all looked fine and well at the time of export(*), but later revealed the whole beginning half of the session was omitted in the export. Or worse.
I've lost many days of work because of this. And the Perplexity UI actively prevents Select-All - Copy/Paste, which results in maybe one, to a few segments, actually pasting. There is no direct method of exporting or saving a long session. Test it.
And trying F12 Network etc, etc, reveals even XHR is a dead-end. Effectively. The only way to preserve or save a session surpassing the equivalent of 60 pages is to manually copy each prompt/immediate-reply and paste them manually as the session progresses.
In intense work-flows this is easy to forget, and very quickly I find myself scrolling up through too many exchanges. Severely distracting.
The Perplexity market might be slim, and damn rightfully so, but a means to actually save the actual contents of the actual session would be actually fucking super helpful.
Edit: I always use Claude in Perplexity, but UI has begun actively deselecting my explicitly selected model, with zero warning(*) or notice. I have video of this. I select Claude, query the model for ID, and it says GPT5.1 as I watch my selected model disappear in real time.
Could snapshots via tmutil be used to protect against this kind of thing on MacOS?
https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/creating-managi...