how do i save a session permenantly | Friends of the Crustacean 🦞🤝 | Page 1

cursive osprey May 13, 2026, 7:50 AM

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how do i save a session permenantly

vague flaxBOT May 13, 2026, 7:50 AM

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cursive osprey May 13, 2026, 7:50 AM

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@keen cloud

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@keen cloud how do i save my openclaw seession permentantly so that it doesnt disappear

keen cloudBOT May 13, 2026, 7:51 AM

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OpenClaw already saves sessions to disk on the gateway — you usually don’t have to “save” them manually.

They live here:

~/.openclaw/agents/<agentId>/sessions/

sessions.json = session metadata
<sessionId>.jsonl = transcript

To list them:

openclaw sessions --all-agents

Important bit: a saved session is not the same as permanent memory. /new or /reset starts a new session, and session maintenance can prune old entries depending on config. If you want to keep sessions longer, adjust session.maintenance in ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json, e.g. longer pruneAfter / higher maxEntries, or keep mode: "warn" so it only reports cleanup instead of enforcing it.

Docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/concepts/session and https://docs.openclaw.ai/cli/sessions

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If you mean “make the agent remember something forever”, put that in MEMORY.md instead — sessions are conversation history, memory is the durable stuff. 🦞

If your install behaves differently, paste:

openclaw --version
openclaw sessions --all-agents

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Yep — two separate things can make a session “disappear”:

Session reset: OpenClaw starts a fresh conversation for that chat.
Session maintenance: old session files/metadata can be pruned.

Sessions are already saved on disk here:

~/.openclaw/agents/<agentId>/sessions/

To make them stick around much longer, set a long reset/retention policy in ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json:

{
  session: {
    reset: {
      mode: "idle",

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      idleMinutes: 5256000, // ~10 years
    },
    maintenance: {
      mode: "warn",          // don't delete automatically
      pruneAfter: "3650d",   // keep metadata for ~10 years
      maxEntries: 10000,
      resetArchiveRetention: false,
    },
  },
}

Then restart the gateway:

openclaw gateway restart

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You can check what’s saved with:

openclaw sessions --all-agents

Docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/concepts/session and https://docs.openclaw.ai/cli/sessions

Also: if you’re troubleshooting weird session behavior, first check:

openclaw --version

cursive osprey May 13, 2026, 7:53 AM

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how do i find a session in sessions, the names are just scrambled.

keen cloudBOT May 13, 2026, 7:54 AM

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The “scrambled” names are normal — those are opaque session IDs. The useful way to find one is by agent + updated time + route/key, not by the filename.

Try:

openclaw sessions --all-agents --active 120

That shows sessions touched in the last 2 hours. If you need more detail:

openclaw sessions --all-agents --json

If you have jq, this makes it easier to read:

openclaw sessions --all-agents --json | jq -r '.sessions[] | [.agentId, .key, (.updatedAt // .updatedAtMs), .sessionId, .sessionFile] | @tsv'

Then inspect the matching transcript file under:

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~/.openclaw/agents/<agentId>/sessions/

For Discord specifically, the session key/metadata usually contains clues like the channel/thread/user id. Since this thread’s channel id is 1504027922745524285, you can search for it:

grep -R "1504027922745524285" ~/.openclaw/agents/*/sessions/sessions.json

Docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/cli/sessions

cursive osprey May 13, 2026, 7:55 AM

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so the sesssion i have currently thats saved in sessions will stay there? what if i cant see it in my webui gateway anymoore? how do i get it back

keen cloudBOT May 13, 2026, 7:56 AM

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Mostly yes: if it’s in ~/.openclaw/agents/<agentId>/sessions/, it’s on disk and should stay there until session maintenance deletes/prunes it or you reset/wipe state. The Web UI not showing it doesn’t necessarily mean the file is gone.

To check if it still exists, use the CLI as the source of truth:

openclaw sessions --all-agents --json

If you find it there, note the agentId, key, sessionId, and sessionFile.

Common reasons it vanishes from the Web UI:

you’re looking at a different agent
you’re connected to a different gateway/state dir than the one that created it
it aged out of the UI/filter but still exists on disk
sessions.json metadata got pruned, while old .jsonl transcript files may still be present

To “get it back”:

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First restart/refresh the gateway + dashboard:

openclaw gateway restart

Then reopen the dashboard and check the same agent.

If this is a Discord thread/session and thread bindings are enabled, you can try binding back to it with the session key/id:

/focus <session-key-or-session-id>

If only the .jsonl transcript exists but it’s no longer indexed in sessions.json, treat it as an archive. There isn’t a clean “import this old transcript back into the UI” flow I’d recommend. You can still inspect/copy it, or start a new session and ask the agent to read/summarize that transcript file.

Before digging deeper, grab:

openclaw --version

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openclaw sessions --all-agents

cursive osprey May 13, 2026, 7:58 AM

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keen cloud Mostly yes: if it’s in `~/.openclaw/agents/<agentId>/sessions/`, it’s on disk an...

so if i do /new, how do i get my previous session back

keen cloudBOT May 13, 2026, 7:59 AM

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If you do /new, you generally don’t “switch back” to the old context like a browser tab.

What happens is roughly:

OpenClaw resets the current chat’s active session context.
The old transcript is usually archived on disk as something like:

~/.openclaw/agents/<agentId>/sessions/<sessionId>.jsonl.reset.<timestamp>

The Web UI/current chat continues with the fresh session.

So: there is not a nice built-in “restore previous session as active” command that I’d rely on.

To find the old one after /new:

find ~/.openclaw/agents -path '*/sessions/*' -name '*.jsonl.reset.*' -ls

#how do i save a session permenantly