Claude-File-Recovery, recover files from your ~/.claude sessions

hjtenklooster was working in Obsidian—one of those research and plan markdown files you actually care about—and Claude Code executed an rm -rf that didn't just delete the symlink, it followed it and nuked the real directories underneath. Gone. The backup hadn't run in a month. Classic.

Rather than just cry into their beer, they built claude-file-recovery, a CLI tool and TUI that extracts any file Claude Code ever read, edited, or wrote from your ~/.claude session history. It can even recover earlier versions of a file at specific points in time. The tool parses JSONL session transcripts and pulls out the content like some digital archaeologist excavating your destroyed work.

Here's the wild part: Claude Code auto-deletes local chat and session logs after 30 days by default. Thirty. Days. So if you don't change the cleanupPeriodDays setting in your settings, that safety net disappears automatically. That's a lot of people's research, plans, and half-written code just vanishing into the void.

One developer, one painful mistake, one tool that might save your ass someday. No funding, no hype, just a person who got burned and built a parachute.