Those users would be wise to back those files up if they consider them valuable intellectual property. If they're important enough that you'd miss them after a disk failure, then they should have been being backed up already.
It's hard to take any of what's written seriously, given that it's all AI generated. Did the user actually lose "valuable intellectual property", or did they tell claude to write as dire of a justification as possible?
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/4172
or this one from December, still open:
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/9258
Some more fun facts about this:
- it is silent, not announced anywhere, and calls rm on your data
- setting the days to zero doesn't disable it, it immediately rm's ALL your chats
- even setting it to _something_ big doesn't prevent data loss if you launch Claude Code in some modalities (certain subagents, etc) that don't load this config key but perform deletion anyway (with the 30 day default)
Isn’t “Anthropic won’t fix it” a little sensational
Ccrider is the one I use: https://github.com/neilberkman/ccrider
Session backups live outside of ~.claude so are not deleted and can be resumed.
I think it's more like, "We don't want our harness to need to be able to interpret every version of our conversation format indefinitely."
which makes anthropic on the whole a lot less trustworthy to have access to any machine
Imagine taking a leave, come back in 30 days, boom. Your transcripts are rm'd, silently, without any notification or confirmations.
Bonus: setting it to 0 days rms everything immediately
Film at 11.
Oh wait, they just complained about Codex doing this a day or so ago.