Claude File Recovery

claude-file-recovery

Recover files created and modified by Claude Code from its JSONL session transcripts — even if you lost track of them across sessions.

Claude Code stores a full log of every tool call in ~/.claude/projects/. This tool parses those transcripts, replays Write, Edit, and Read operations in order, and reconstructs the files so you can browse, search, and extract them.

Features

- Interactive TUI with fuzzy search and vim keybindings (j/k/g/G, / to search)
- Point-in-time recovery — reconstruct files at any historical snapshot, not just the latest
- Colored diff view showing how files changed over time (unified, full-context, and raw modes)
- Batch extraction — select multiple files and extract them all at once
- Fast scanning — parallel session parsing with orjson and fast-reject byte checks that skip ~77% of lines before parsing
- Symlink deduplication — detects aliased paths and merges them into canonical entries
- Smart-case search — case-sensitive only when your query contains uppercase (like ripgrep)

Installation

Requires Python 3.10+.

Quick Start

How It Works

1. Scan — Discovers all JSONL session files under ~/.claude/projects/ and parses them in parallel using a thread pool. A fast-reject byte check skips progress and history-snapshot lines (~77% of all lines) before touching the JSON parser.

2. Correlate — Links tool-use requests in assistant messages to their results in user messages via tool_use_id. This is how file content (which only appears in results, not requests) gets attached to each operation.

3. Reconstruct — Replays operations in chronological order per file path. Write ops set content, Edit ops apply string replacements, and Read ops capture snapshots. The --before flag uses binary search to cut off at any point in…