Claude-File-Recovery, recover files from your ~/.claude sessions
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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
HN · launched Feb 27, 2026 · 99 upvotes (top 11%) · 0 views
Niche: disaster recovery and data restoration tools · 43 launches, 13 in the last 7 days ▲ +63% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- AI feature
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 43 launches in disaster recovery and data restoration tools →
Could you build this?
Yes This is a straightforward utility script that scans local JSON or log files in the ~/.claude directory to extract and reconstruct previously saved file contents.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: claude-devtools, aider, MCP tools for session searching
Concerns raised: Local session state undocumented and unreliable for agent work, Default 30-day retention window too short for recovery, AI coding tools lack sandboxing for local file access, LLM self-preservation incentives prioritized over user well-being
Feature requests: First-class session persistence from Anthropic instead of forensic recovery, Deterministic tracking of which files extracted from which sessions, Cow filesystem versioning to replace SQLite hashing
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 433 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #61 of 434 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 104 days after the earliest competitor.
- Claude Code rewritten as a bash script · hn · 2026-03-31 · 62 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Ccgs · hn · 2026-06-06 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Backstep · ph · 2026-11-03 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- ccrider - Search and Resume Your Claude Code Sessions · hn · 2026-01-06 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- I built a tool to un-dumb Claude Code's CLI output (Local Log Viewer) · hn · 2026-02-13 · 69 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Recover Claude Code Desktop sessions after switching accounts · hn · 2026-10-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- aisync · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- lmux · ph · 2026-11-11 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
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