Claude Migrator

Switching Claude accounts hides your history. Take it with you.

A small macOS app with two buttons: back up one account, import into another.

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Run it

git clone https://github.com/pokharnajay/claude-migrator.git
cd claude-migrator
python3 app.py

That is the whole installation.

The first run takes about a minute: it creates a .venv inside the folder, installs PySide6 into it, and starts the window. Every run after that opens immediately. Nothing is installed into your system Python.

Back Up and Import stay off while the Claude desktop app is running, because Claude holds these files open and rewrites them as it goes. The window has a Quit Claude button, and it notices on its own when Claude has gone.

• macOS 11 or newer
• Python 3.10+ — python3 --version to check. macOS ships one; if it is too old, brew install python or grab it from python.org.
• About 150 MB of disk for the .venv

.venv/bin/pip install pyinstaller
.venv/bin/python packaging/build.py --install

Builds a self-contained Claude Migrator.app (Python and Qt inside, about 75 MB) and puts it in /Applications. Run it again after changing the code to replace the installed copy.

Delete the .venv folder and try again:

rm -rf .venv
python3 app.py

Moving to another account

1. Signed in to the account you are leaving, quit Claude and press Back Up. You get ~/Downloads/claude-app-backup-<timestamp>/.
2. Open Claude, sign out, sign in to the other account, and quit Claude again. The window picks up the new account by itself.
3. Press Import… and choose that folder. You see what will be added before anything happens.

Open Claude and the chats are in the sidebar.

The old account was signed in on this Mac before, but you never backed it up? Its history is still on disk. Back up another account on this Mac… backs it up without signing in to it.

To move to another Mac, copy the backup folder across and import it there.

What a backup holds

Chats	Claude Code and Cowork conversations, which ones are archived, and the transcripts they need to open
Cowork	Memory, plugins, settings and artifacts
Scheduled tasks	The tasks themselves and their prompts
Setup	Desktop MCP servers and extensions; ~/.claude settings, CLAUDE.md, plugins, skills, agents and commands; MCP servers from ~/.claude.json

Left out on purpose: sign-in state and tokens, caches, and the multi-gigabyte VM images Claude downloads again by itself. A backup is checked file by file against the original before it is called done.

Copies are APFS clones, so even gigabytes of transcripts take seconds and almost no extra disk until something changes.

The window counts runs of scheduled tasks separately from chats. A task that runs every twenty minutes leaves a session behind each time, so a raw count can be ten times the number of conversations you actually had.

How import decides

One rule covers every file:

• Not here yet → added.
• Here already → replaced only if the backup's copy is newer; kept if the one here is newer.

A chat is matched by its session file, so importing the same backup twice changes nothing the second time, and no chat is ever doubled. A chat you carried on after importing it keeps your newer turns.

The archive list, Cowork's artifacts and scheduled tasks are merged, not replaced. MCP servers are added to ~/.claude.json unless one of the same name is already there.

A backup of another account goes into the signed-in account's active workspace, which is the one Claude shows. A backup of the signed-in account itself goes back where it came from.

What it will not do

• Never deletes anything. Nothing already in the account is removed, including chats the backup does not have.
• Never loses what it replaces. Anything an import changes is first saved to ~/Downloads/claude-import-undo-<timestamp>/ at its original path.
• Never half-writes. Every file is written beside its destination and renamed into place.
• Never touches sign-in. Claude's account config, tokens and cookies are not backed up and never written.
• Never trusts a backup folder. It is checked against its own manifest before import: every file must be present at its recorded size, and any path that points outside the folder is refused.
• Runs once at a time, enforced by a lock that reclaims itself after a crash.

Privacy

Everything happens on your Mac. The app makes no network requests — there is no networking code in it. Account e-mails are read from your own local files purely to label accounts in the window.

The one time anything is downloaded is the first run, when pip fetches PySide6 from PyPI.

How it is put together

Module	Responsibility
app.py	Entry point — bootstraps the environment, opens the window
storage.py	Finds accounts, workspaces and the signed-in account; counts chats
identity.py	Resolves an account UUID to an e-mail and name
backup.py	Makes and checks a backup folder
restore.py	Validates a backup, plans an import, carries it out
safety.py	Every write — containment, space, atomic placement, locking
ui.py	The window

.venv/bin/pip install pytest
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen .venv/bin/python -m pytest -q    # 124 tests

Tests never touch real Claude data. They build a synthetic storage tree in a temp directory, including a planted token that must never reach a backup and damaged backups the importer has to refuse.

Troubleshooting

python3: command not found — install Python from python.org or with brew install python.

The buttons are greyed out — Claude is still running. Press Quit Claude, or quit it yourself (⌘Q, and check it is not in the Dock).

"That is not a Claude Migrator backup" — choose the claude-app-backup-… folder itself, not Downloads and not a folder inside it.

"The backup is incomplete" — a file was removed or changed since the backup was made, often by a partial copy between Macs. Copy the folder again, or make a new backup.

"Made by an older version" — folders named claude-backup-… come from the previous version of this app. Make a new backup with Back Up.

Imported chats open empty — the chat came back but its transcript in ~/.claude/projects was already gone when the backup was made.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE.

Not affiliated with Anthropic.