transcript-retention

Transcript Retention

Session stores grow without bound (observed 2026-06-12: ~/.codex/sessions 3.4G, ~/.claude/projects 700M). But transcripts are not junk: they are the data source for ../audit-skill-hygiene/SKILL.md and for any future usage analytics. Retention policy therefore defines the maximum audit window — decide retention with that trade-off, never as plain disk cleanup.

Inventory first (always safe)

du -sh ~/.claude/projects ~/.codex/sessions ~/.codex/shell_snapshots \
       ~/.codex/log ~/.codex/tmp 2>/dev/null
# Age profile: bytes per month
find ~/.codex/sessions ~/.claude/projects -name "*.jsonl" -printf "%TY-%Tm %s\n" 2>/dev/null \
  | awk '{b[$1]+=$2} END {for (m in b) printf "%s  %6.0f MB\n", m, b[m]/1e6}' | sort

Report the inventory and the proposed action per tier before touching anything.

Default policy (adjust per user preference)

Age	Action	Rationale
< 60d	keep as-is	active audit window, resumable sessions
60–180d	gzip in place	~10x smaller; still grep-able via zgrep for audits
> 180d	propose deletion	beyond any realistic audit window

• Compression is safe and reversible; deletion is destructive — always list the candidates (count + size + date range) and get explicit confirmation before rm.
• Never touch files modified in the last 7 days regardless of policy: an active session's transcript may have an old creation date.
• ~/.codex/tmp and rotated logs are exempt from the confirmation rule (genuinely disposable), but report what was reclaimed.

Hard stops

• Do not delete or compress sqlite databases or their -wal/-shm sidecars (goals_*.sqlite, memories_*.sqlite, state_*.sqlite) — they are live state, not history, and a WAL file belongs to its DB.
• Do not prune transcripts younger than the longest audit window the user relies on; if unsure, ask before the delete tier (compress tier is fine).
• If a zgrep-based audit has never been exercised after the first compression pass, run one spot-check (zgrep -c '"name":"Skill"' on a compressed file) and note that audit tooling must use zgrep/zcat for the compressed tier.