If you use more than one Claude account in Claude Desktop, a personal plan next to a Team seat, or a second Max subscription, you have seen this: sign out, sign into the other account, open the Code tab, and the sidebar is empty. Every Claude Code session you had is gone from the list.
Nothing was deleted. This post shows where the sessions are, why the sidebar cannot see them, how to move one by hand, and the tool I wrote to move all of them in one click. It applies to macOS. The same folder layout exists on Windows and Linux, so the mechanism is the same there even though the tool is not.
What a Claude Code session is on disk
A session in Claude Desktop is three things:
- The transcript, a
.jsonlfile under~/.claude/projects/<project-slug>/<session-uuid>.jsonl. Every message and tool result lives here. - A sidecar directory beside it, named after the session uuid, with subagent output and other attachments.
- A small record file under
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude-code-sessions/<account-uuid>/<organization-uuid>/local_<id>.json. It holds the title, the session id, archive and star flags, and runtime bookkeeping.
The first two are shared by every account on the Mac. The third is filed per account and per organization, and Claude Desktop builds the Code sidebar by listing only the folder of the account and organization you are signed into.
That is the whole problem. Switch accounts and Desktop looks in a different folder. The transcripts did not move, the records are just somewhere Desktop is not looking. Sign back into the first account and everything is listed again.
Two consequences follow. A Team seat and a personal plan on the same email are two organizations, so they are two sidebars. And the CLI does not have this problem at all: claude --resume in a project folder reads the shared transcripts directly, regardless of who is logged in.
The manual fix
To show a session under the other account:
- Quit Claude Desktop completely.
- Find the session's record file in the folder of the account that created it. The title inside the JSON tells you which one it is.
- Move that file into the other account's organization folder. Keep the file name and the ids inside it unchanged.
- Reopen Desktop signed into that account.
Do this only while Desktop is closed. Desktop keeps the records of open sessions in memory and rewrites them, so a file moved underneath a running session gets its title and turn count rolled back.
Two more things to know. If the record has a non-empty bridgeSessionIds list, the session had Remote Control enabled, and that stays with the original account. And a record that was deleted, by a reset or a bad update, cannot be moved. The transcript survives and the CLI still resumes it, but the sidebar needs the record rebuilt.
Moving all of them
Doing this by hand for a few sessions is fine. For a few hundred, across four accounts, several times a week, it is not. I wrote claude-transplant for that. Disclosure: it is my tool, open source, MIT, not affiliated with Anthropic.
npx claude-transplant menubar
It installs a menubar app. Open it, check the accounts to take from, pick the one to land in, click Move. It writes the same record under the target organization with the same session id, verifies that the transcript, the sidecars, and both records are unchanged, and parks the source record in a quarantine folder so undo can put everything back. Nothing is copied, so disk use does not grow. Sessions that a running Desktop worker still owns are held until you approve a restart of Desktop, or skipped.
It is macOS only today. Windows and Linux use the same folder layout, so a port is paths and process checks, and pull requests are welcome.
Things to decide before you move
Moving history is your call, but two things are worth knowing first. Continuing a moved session sends the whole conversation to the account you are signed into on the next message. Team owners see usage analytics only, but Enterprise compliance tooling can retrieve Claude Code session transcripts, so personal history moved into an Enterprise organization becomes that organization's data. And moving history out of a Team organization is a decision for that organization, not only for you.
Tested with
| claude-transplant | macOS | Claude Desktop | Claude Code | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4.0.4 | 27.0 | 1.46388.4 | 2.1.260 | 2026-09-07 |
The folder layout is undocumented and Anthropic can change it. Anthropic's tracking issue for the per-account scoping is anthropics/claude-code#74662, and the feature request for account profiles in Desktop is #18435. Until one of those lands, the folder above is all you need to know.
Repository: https://github.com/vitaliyhayda/claude-transplant
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