Recover deleted Claude Desktop conversations from Chromium cache

Someone deleted a critical conversation in Claude Desktop. Do not panic — the app is essentially Temu Chromium, and it aggressively caches everything from the server. Here's how to pull your data out of that cache.

Immediate steps

• Fully exit Claude Desktop (File → Exit / Menu → Quit). Use task manager to confirm no process remains.
• Copy the entire cache directory before doing anything else.

Cache location

Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\Cache\Cache_Data\
macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/Cache/Cache_Data/
Linux: ~/.config/Claude/Cache/Cache_Data/

You'll see files named index, data_0 through data_3, and f_*. Filter the f_* files by today's date to reduce noise.

Extraction with Claude Code CLI

In a backup of the cache, set up a Python virtual environment and launch Claude Code CLI. Install dependencies:

pip install brotli zstd gzip deflate zip
pip install ccl_chromium_reader  # or git clone and install from source

Use this prompt with Claude Code (replace <search phrases here> with your conversation UUID or keywords):

Claude, I have made a boo-boo and deleted very important stuff from my Claude Desktop install, I need you to help recover it!

We are trying to recover conversations and files from a Chromium blockfile cache. The cache files (index, data 0..data_3, f *) are in this directory.
Use the ccl_chromium_reader package to walk every cache entry, decompress the HTTP body, and write each response to its own file in a new "extracted" subdirectory.
Flag any entry whose decoded bodies contains <search phrases here>.

The extracted folder will contain JSON, HTML, and binary files. Your conversation is in whichever response body has a URL containing /chat_conversations/<uuid>. Generated artifacts (docx/pdf) come out as separate files.

Notes

• This is a cache, so everything is not guaranteed to be there — run the recovery as soon as you notice the deletion.
• The same approach works for the claude.ai website: close Chrome, locate its Cache_Data directory, and follow the same extraction steps.
• Kudos to cclgroupltd for the ccl_chromium_reader package.