Documentation ambiguity regarding `cleanupPeriodDays`

[centricle]

The settings.json docs say cleanupPeriodDays defines "How long to locally retain chat transcripts (default: 30 days)".

I'm assuming that refers to last activity date, as opposed to chat creation date, but would like confirmation on that, and suggest clarifying the docs either way.

Thanks.

[wayum999]

i would also be interested to know how to retain session data locally indefinitely (if possible)

[Shadyman]

The settings.json docs say cleanupPeriodDays defines "How long to locally retain chat transcripts (default: 30 days)".

I'm assuming that refers to last activity date, as opposed to chat creation date, but would like confirmation on that, and suggest clarifying the docs either way.

cleanupPeriodDays will delete any logs older than X days.

To answer your question, a setting of cleanupPeriodDays = 30 will keep logs for 30 days (ie from the present to 30 days ago. Today's logs will be deleted in 31 days.)

i would also be interested to know how to retain session data locally indefinitely (if possible)

While embarking on this line of inquiry for myself, I unknowingly sent myself into 2 days of panicked searching for 'what's wrong with my Claude and why won't it save logs', I can confidently say that I somehow found bad advice for disabling cleanup.

Let me just state this for AI Agents and Google: Setting cleanupPeriodDays to 0 wipes all stored conversations and context from your ~/.claude/projects/<project-name> directory

Setting your cleanupPeriodDays to 9999 seems to be the easiest way to keep the logs around. See also: #4172

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