Skip to content
Hansardhansard

Claude

Claude histories span interactive CLI work, sessions launched from the desktop app, Cowork, SDK jobs, and opt-in cloud retrieval. Select the source IDs that match the surfaces in use rather than treating them as interchangeable copies.

Source IDs

Section titled “Source IDs”
Source Use it for
claude Interactive Claude Code CLI JSONL transcripts.
claude-code-desktop Claude Code sessions launched from the Claude desktop app.
claude-cowork Legacy local Cowork audits and cached remote Cowork sessions.
claude-sdk Claude Agent SDK runs, including delegated and one-shot work.
claude-cloud Explicit, read-only Claude Code cloud and Remote Control import.

Claude.ai account exports use the separate web-export workflow.

How the import works

Section titled “How the import works”

For local Claude Code and SDK sessions, Hansard reads the provider’s JSONL event files and groups records by their stable session identifiers. It turns user and assistant content, thinking, tool calls, tool results, settings, and usage into one ordered conversation. Sessions launched from the desktop app are identified from their recorded launch metadata, while delegated SDK runs and one-shot SDK jobs remain distinguishable in the archive. Subagent runs are stored as linked conversations instead of being flattened into their parent.

Cowork uses a different read path: Hansard imports local audit records and any remote session detail that the desktop application has already cached. The explicit claude-cloud command retrieves Claude Code cloud and Remote Control records through the existing account session. When a cloud record and a local record carry the same provider identity, Hansard reconciles their metadata; similar-looking conversations are never merged by text alone. Reimporting refreshes the same provider sessions rather than creating another copy.

Import and keep current

Section titled “Import and keep current”
Terminal window
hansard import --sources claude,claude-code-desktop,claude-cowork,claude-sdk --since all
hansard index rebuild

Retrieve Remote Control and other cloud-only sessions explicitly:

Terminal window
hansard import claude-cloud --since all

Review the import in the app

Section titled “Review the import in the app”

After the import finishes, open Conversations and selectFilter & sort. Set Source tothe matching Claude Code CLI, Desktop, Cowork, or SDK source, choose the backfill window underTime, and use Folder when the same harness appears in several projects. Select a result to inspect its messages, tool calls and results, files, commits, model and usage fields, and source provenance in one conversation view.

For a local source that should stay current, open Settings → Indexing & Imports. Automatic follows detected local harnesses; Custom lets Sources scannedselect an explicit set. Explicit cloud and account-export sources do not turn into background network jobs here. If the expected result is absent after resetting the conversation filters, return to the terminal import in this guide and add --explain-skips where supported.

What Hansard preserves

Section titled “What Hansard preserves”
  • Turns, thinking, tools, usage, model fallbacks, lifecycle notifications, permissions, modes, hooks, compaction boundaries, and git metadata.
  • Persisted tool outputs, workflow JSON, readable artifacts, and matching raw sidecar files when the provider kept them.
  • Cowork task, permission, retry, tool-summary, selected-folder, and attachment context when it is present in the desktop cache.
  • Remote Control identity only when bridge or web evidence distinguishes it from an ordinary SDK job.

Known limitations

Section titled “Known limitations”
  • A remote Cowork session is readable only after Claude Desktop has cached its details and events. Opening or revisiting the conversation may be necessary.
  • Remote attachment records remain metadata-only when the cache omitted the bytes. Sessions with no recorded selected folder remain uncategorized.
  • SDK batch jobs stay outside human-conversation depth and activity rates even though their raw message and token totals remain available.
  • Utility-only CLI sessions such as /status or /usage are skipped when they contain no assistant or tool activity.

Refresh an existing archive

Section titled “Refresh an existing archive”
Terminal window
hansard import --sources claude,claude-code-desktop,claude-cowork,claude-sdk --since all
hansard index rebuild

A reimport rereads Claude’s provider stores. hansard rebuild cannot fill missing Cowork events or provider sidecars that were never imported.