How Claude Desktop stores Code sessions, and how I share them across accounts

Tarun Gupta — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 07:57:03 +0000

I use Claude Code inside Claude Desktop with two accounts on the same laptop: a personal one and a work one. For a while, one small thing annoyed me every day:

every time I switched accounts, my entire Code sidebar changed.

The session I'd been working in an hour earlier was simply gone until I switched back. Nothing was deleted. It just belonged to the other account.

So I dug into where Claude Desktop keeps those sessions, and wrote a small open-source helper, My Shared Claude, that gives all my accounts one shared local session list. This post covers what I found and how it works.

Not affiliated with Anthropic. This relies on Claude Desktop's current on-disk layout, which could change in any update.

Where the sessions live

Claude Desktop keeps a data folder per user:

OS	Data folder
macOS	`~/Library/Application Support/Claude`
Windows	`%APPDATA%\Claude` (plus some Store-package variants)
Linux	`~/.config/Claude`

Inside it, local Code sessions are stored like this:

claude-code-sessions/
  <account-uuid>/
    <organization-uuid>/
      local_<session-uuid>.json
      local_<session-uuid>.json
      ...

Each account/organization pair gets its own folder of local_*.json session records. The Code sidebar only reads the folder that matches whoever is signed in. That's the whole reason sessions "disappear" when you switch.

One surprise: a single email login can have several organization folders, so you'll often find more folders than you have accounts.

The approach: merge once, then link

I considered syncing copies back and forth, but that means watching files, resolving conflicts on every change, and running something in the background. Instead, the tool does a one-time merge and then lets the filesystem do the work:

Find every claude-code-sessions/<account>/<org>/ folder.
Merge all local_*.json records into one shared store (shared-code-sessions/). If the same session ID appears in two folders, the most recently modified file wins.
Back up each original folder by moving it to a timestamped backup directory.
Link each original folder path to the shared store.

After that, every account reads and writes the same folder, so new sessions show up everywhere automatically. Nothing runs in the background.

def create_directory_link(path, target):
    if sys.platform == 'win32':
        # A junction needs no Developer Mode or admin rights
        ...  # New-Item -ItemType Junction via PowerShell
    else:
        path.symlink_to(target, target_is_directory=True)

Windows: junctions, not symlinks

On macOS and Linux a plain symlink is fine. On Windows, creating a symlink usually needs Developer Mode or admin rights, which I wanted to avoid for non-technical teammates. Directory junctions work for a normal user, so the tool creates those through PowerShell.

Two details mattered:

Paths are passed as quoted literals inside an encoded PowerShell command, so a folder name with odd characters stays data and can't become part of the command.
Removing a link has to remove the link, not the folder it points to. On Windows a junction is removed with rmdir. The tool refuses to remove anything that isn't actually a link.

Not sharing what shouldn't be shared

Session records contain some fields that belong to the account that created them, such as Remote Control / bridge IDs and remote MCP server configuration. Carrying those into another account would be wrong, so imported copies have them stripped:

def clean(record):
    result = dict(record)
    for key in list(result):
        if key.startswith(('remoteControl', 'bridge', 'steeredByRemote')) or key in {
            'remoteMcpServersConfig', ...
        }:
            result.pop(key, None)
    result['remoteControlAutoEligible'] = False
    return result

What it deliberately doesn't touch:

logins and subscriptions
ordinary chats, Cowork and cloud sessions
connectors and their authentication
org policies and available models
sidebar preferences (folder grouping is per account)

One honest caveat: only combine histories you're comfortable having available under every included account. If one of them is a work org, think about that first.

Safety rails

Since this moves folders that hold your conversation history, most of the code is about not making things worse:

Claude must be closed. It checks for running Claude processes and stops if it finds any.
Preview first. The default run is a dry run that reports what it found. Nothing changes until you type SHARE.
Validation before touching anything. Every record must be a real file (not a symlink), parse as JSON, and have a sessionId that matches its filename and is a valid UUID. Anything unexpected stops the run before any folder is moved.
Journal plus backups. Each change is recorded in a small JSON journal (written atomically, owner-only permissions), so status and undo know exactly what was done.
One-step undo. Undo removes the links and restores the original folders from backup. New sessions created while sharing was on stay in the shared store, so nothing is lost.

Making it usable for non-developers

Half the people I wanted to help don't use a terminal, so each OS gets a double-click launcher (.command, .cmd, .sh) that checks for Python 3.9+ and then shows a small menu:

1. Set up / add accounts (default)
2. Check status
3. Undo sharing
4. Exit

There are no dependencies, nothing to pip install, and it never asks for admin rights or sudo.

Testing on three OSes

The filesystem behavior is the risky part, and it differs per OS. GitHub Actions runs the test suite on macOS, Windows and Ubuntu with Python 3.9 and 3.12, covering setup, adding a new account later, and undo using real symlinks and junctions.

I've verified end-to-end history loading in Claude Desktop on macOS. On Windows and Linux, the automated filesystem tests pass, and I'd really like reports from real installs.

Try it

Repo (MIT): https://github.com/gtarun/My-Shared-Claude
Direct download: https://github.com/gtarun/My-Shared-Claude/releases/latest/download/My-Shared-Claude-v1.0.zip
Product Hunt (launched today, feedback welcome): https://www.producthunt.com/products/my-shared-claude

Quit Claude, double-click the launcher for your OS, check the preview, and type SHARE.

If you try it, I'd love to hear:

Does it work on your Windows or Linux setup?
Would you want to choose which accounts get linked, instead of all of them?

DEV Community: Tarun Gupta