/resume Recovery

Sessions die. Terminals crash. SSH connections drop. Laptops run out of battery. The /resume command recovers a previous Claude Code session — restoring the conversation history, context, and state from the last checkpoint. It is your safety net for the inevitable moments when a session ends unexpectedly.

The mechanics are simple: type /resume in a new Claude Code session. Claude presents your recent sessions sorted by recency. Select the session you want to resume. The context is restored, and you can continue from where you left off. The restoration is not perfect — some ephemeral state (like pending tool executions that were interrupted) may be lost. But the conversation history, the files Claude has read, and the decisions you made are preserved.

Resume is most valuable for long-running sessions where rebuilding context would be expensive. A session where you spent 30 minutes in plan mode discussing an architecture decision, loaded twelve files for context, and were halfway through implementation — losing that session means losing the accumulated context that took 30 minutes to build. /resume recovers it in seconds.

The best practice is defensive: before starting any task that will build significant context, make a mental note that /resume exists. If the session dies, do not start a new session and try to rebuild. Resume first. The recovered context — even if slightly stale — is better than starting from zero. And combine /resume with regular progress saves to files. A session that saved its plan to a markdown file before starting execution can be resumed with full fidelity: /resume restores the session state, and the saved file provides the detailed plan.