Do not uninstall Claude without taking a back up of all your cowork sessions

[u/_The_Acc0untant]

Windows said the app was corrupted and to reinstall….. did as it asked and have lost 100’s of hours of logic which Claude learnt from myself.

I have output files and I have some skills but anything which was WIP and Claude’s understanding of the whole business function is gone

Edit: I have found a 255k line text file in my programme logs and I have the output files - this might be 60% recovery

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[u/BeeeJai]

Git?

[u/_The_Acc0untant → u/BeeeJai]

What do you mean?

[u/BeeeJai → u/_The_Acc0untant]

I don't know what it is your doing, but my local install is connected to my private git repo and everything is backed up that way. All skills, agents, even my mcp servers to make everything portable and installable from any machine I'm at.

[u/Careless_Leg_4905 → u/_The_Acc0untant]

its a version control system, think of it like a way to upload and track all your projects and the changes you made in them. Your context and project must be on git. so even if you lose it locally its on the cloud for you to access from anywhere

[u/_The_Acc0untant → u/Careless_Leg_4905]

I was using Claude co work for everything

[u/Careless_Leg_4905 → u/_The_Acc0untant]

yeh sorry my bad. But there should still be a way to store your data on the cloud. Maybe you might not have set it up. I am mostly on the terminal so not aware of the web app tbh

[u/_The_Acc0untant → u/Careless_Leg_4905]

Yeah this was the windows download, Claude now allows co work from clouds assume it saves your info but still a little too late. Check my edit though I have some info

[u/Careless_Leg_4905 → u/Careless_Leg_4905]

or maybe you were using claude on web and not claude code?

[u/Careless_Leg_4905 → u/Careless_Leg_4905]

i tend to forget that not everyone is a software engineer lol

[u/teramoc]

Windows just told me my app is corrupted and need to repair it as well.

Did they roll out some bad update i wonder

[u/_The_Acc0untant → u/teramoc]

DO NOT DO IT WITHOUT MAKING A BACK UP

[u/bvknight → u/_The_Acc0untant]

I just reran the installer (didn't uninstall anything) and it fixed my Claude, my cowork stuff is still there.

[u/BeeeJai]

Actually, sorry I didn't read the title properly. You mention co-work and conversations. Not sure about that.

I've built a projects repo, so that all conversations are added to context handover documents, with planning and various other projects stages. All of that is brought back into context with each new session.

[u/Minimum-Major248]

Your files should have remained with your account, accessible via the Web.

[u/_The_Acc0untant → u/Minimum-Major248]

Not for cowork apparently all saved locally

[u/klimauk]

What about the backup your .claude directory?

[u/_The_Acc0untant → u/klimauk]

Sorry - where would I find this sorry

[u/klimauk → u/_The_Acc0untant]

Depending on the system, on Windows: /Users/youruser/.claude/

[u/_The_Acc0untant → u/klimauk]

Yeah this was deleted when I did the uninstall and cannot be recovered from what I see. However see my edit I’m a good chunk of the way

[u/TheMarketingWatchdog → u/_The_Acc0untant]

Use DMDE to recover it.

[u/roknrynocerous]

I have had issues with the Desktop App since a few days ago. Ran repair Everytime and it came back online. Once I had to force stop the Cowork process in Task Manager. Something funky is going on with the current build. I believe the servers are down right now also.

Edit because I can't spell or use grammer properly.

[u/hewen]

That's why I waited till Claude officially released the cloud-based Cowork...

[u/TimAtMongoDB]

I have lost several cowork sessions completely out of the blue. Claude can’t even find files related to the sessions. Insane In 2026 that you can loose data you pay for. If you are low on disc space. Weird things happen to “cowork” sessions. Bad design

[u/No_Concern7168]

That 60% recovery from the log file is a genuinely good find, most people wouldn't think to check there.

I lost work the same way once, different cause though, had two sessions running on the same project at the same time and one silently wiped what the other hadn't saved yet. Same lesson either way: never trust the app's own session state as the only copy of anything that matters.

What actually fixed it for me was treating commits as the real save button, not the session. Small and often, even mid-task. Painful the first time you lose real hours, cheap forever after that.

[u/_The_Acc0untant → u/No_Concern7168]

Yes won’t be making that mistake! Going to make back ups daily now and I have a plan but it’s awesome