What is in ~/.claude, and what is safe to delete

Last checked 12 October 2026

~/.claude grows mainly from conversations in projects/, old versions in ~/.local/share/claude/versions and file-history/. Caches, logs and old versions are safe to delete. Conversations are safe if you won't resume them. Never delete settings, CLAUDE.md, memory/ folders or your credentials.

What is in ~/.claude

Claude Code writes everything to ~/.claude, unless you moved it with the CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR environment variable. Native installs also keep every version they downloaded in ~/.local/share/claude/versions. Here is what each folder is, and what removing it costs you.

What grows the most

On a Mac used every day, three things usually account for almost all of the space:

1. Conversations in projects/. Every message, tool call and file read is stored. Long agentic sessions with large files can reach hundreds of megabytes each.
2. Old versions in ~/.local/share/claude/versions. Each update downloads a new version and keeps the previous ones.
3. File history in file-history/, which keeps a copy of every file Claude edited so the edit can be rewound.

To see it on your own Mac:

du -sh ~/.claude/* 2>/dev/null | sort -h | tail -10
du -sh ~/.claude/projects/* 2>/dev/null | sort -h | tail -10
du -sh ~/.local/share/claude/versions/* 2>/dev/null

Nothing above deletes anything.

How to clean it by hand

Quit every Claude Code session first. Cleaning a folder an open session is writing to interrupts that session.

Safe items can be deleted directly:

rm -rf ~/.claude/file-history ~/.claude/shell-snapshots ~/.claude/paste-cache \
       ~/.claude/debug ~/.claude/plugins/cache

Old versions: keep the one your claude command points to.

readlink ~/.local/bin/claude          # the version in use
ls ~/.local/share/claude/versions      # all versions kept

Delete the other folders in versions/, never the one readlink shows.

Old conversations: delete the project folders you no longer need in ~/.claude/projects/, but keep any memory/ folder inside them. Folder names are the project path with slashes replaced by dashes, so -Users-you-code-myapp is ~/code/myapp.

Claude Code also removes old conversation files on its own at startup, after the number of days set by cleanupPeriodDays in settings.json (30 by default). If you rely on old sessions, raise it; if projects/ keeps growing, lower it.

What you should never delete

Your settings, CLAUDE.md, skills, agents, commands, hooks and plans are your setup. history.jsonl is your prompt history. Every memory/ folder is what Claude remembers about a project. .credentials.json and ~/.claude.json hold your sign-in. Deleting ~/.claude as a whole removes all of them.

Doing it with Ouste

Ouste shows each of these items with its size and the sentence above, deletes the safe ones, and puts conversations in a 7-day quarantine you can restore in one click. You can export a project's conversations to Markdown before removing them, so you keep what was decided and drop the weight.