Claude transcripts live outside the data home → migrating/backing up the home silently drops all resume history

[vikasprogrammer]

Severity: 🟠 completeness

Discovered during the instawp box-to-box migration (2026-07-21).

Problem

The data home is documented as "the tenant's portable state," but resumable conversation history lives outside it, in ~/.claude/projects/<munged-abs-cwd>/<claude_session_id>.jsonl — where <munged-abs-cwd> is the absolute agent-dir with /→-.

Consequences:

1. A "copy the data home" migration/backup silently drops all resume history — claude --resume finds no transcript.
2. Even when copied, the directory name encodes the old absolute path, so it must be re-munged (-home-OLD-* → -home-NEW-*) to match the new cwd.

Fix direction

• Document clearly that transcripts are not in the data home; and/or
• Point Claude's project dir under the data home (so it travels with the home); or
• Ship a transcript export/import helper as part of a migration/backup command.

Workaround

docs/tenant-box-migration.md §5 rsyncs ~/.claude/projects and re-munges dir names (with a ./ prefix so rsync doesn't parse the leading - as a flag).