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Where your data lives

Everything is local. Nothing ever leaves your machine.

Source of truth (read-only to Recall)

  • ~/.claude/projects/<encoded-path>/<session-uuid>.jsonl — Claude Code's own session files. We read these; we never modify them.

Our own data

  • ~/.recall/db.sqlite — the indexed database (projects, sessions, messages, FTS5 search index, aliases, notes)
  • ~/.recall/aliases.json — plain-text mirror of every alias (with full edit history). Automatically rewritten on every alias change
  • ~/.recall/notes/<session-uuid>.md — one plain-markdown file per note. You can edit these in your favorite editor
  • ~/.recall/daemon.pid — running daemon metadata
  • ~/.recall/daemon.log — daemon logs (troubleshooting)

Back up

Everything Recall owns lives under ~/.recall/. Tar it up:

tar czf recall-backup.tgz ~/.recall/

To restore on a new machine: untar into the new ~/.recall/, then run recall start. Your aliases, notes, pins all return.

Reset without data loss

Want to rebuild the SQLite index from scratch?

recall stop
rm ~/.recall/db.sqlite*
recall start
recall index

Your aliases survive because ~/.recall/aliases.json mirrors them. Same for notes (each sits in its own .md file). Tree stays intact.

Never-delete guarantee

Claude Recall never deletes user-created data. Every rename archives the prior value. Every note save keeps the previous version. If you "clear" something, you get an empty value with the history still readable.