Fix dataclaw issue #16 — prevent automatic deletion of old sessions, create PR

[xliry]

Fork repo: peteromallet/dataclaw
Workspace: ~/dataclaw (needs to be cloned first: gh repo clone peteromallet/dataclaw ~/dataclaw)
Create a PR to the upstream repo (peteromallet/dataclaw).

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Issue #16 — Prevent automatic deletion of old sessions

Summary: Some agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Gemini CLI) automatically clean up sessions older than 30 days. This causes data loss for dataclaw which needs to preserve session data.

Issue body:
Some agentic coding tools may automatically clean up sessions older than 30 days. I've confirmed Claude Code and Gemini CLI do so by default. We may tell users to configure these tools not to do so, which helps preserve more data.

Or we may incrementally collect data in dataclaw and make a cron job to periodically do so. But for now I think incremental processing is not strictly needed for data < 100 MB.

Comment from @wjessup (2026-03-01):

Another solution is a proxy to catch and log original sessions.
I could add this into: https://github.com/wjessup/context-compactor

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Approach

• Read the existing codebase to understand how dataclaw collects and stores session data
• Implement a solution to prevent/mitigate automatic deletion (e.g., incremental collection via cron, documentation for tool config, or backup mechanism)
• Consider the proxy approach mentioned in comments as an alternative
• Keep it simple — no over-engineering for < 100 MB data

Deliverables

1. Clone repo if not present
2. Create a branch (e.g. fix/issue-16-prevent-session-deletion)
3. Implement the fix
4. Open PR to peteromallet/dataclaw referencing the issue (Fixes Remove duplicate API docs from CLAUDE.md — MCP description already covers it #16)

[xliry]

Completion Report

Implemented fix for issue #16 — prevent automatic deletion of old sessions.

Changes:

• dataclaw/parser.py: Added BACKUP_BASE_DIR, CLAUDE_BACKUP_PROJECTS_DIR, GEMINI_BACKUP_DIR constants. Updated _discover_claude_projects(), _discover_gemini_projects(), and parse_project_sessions() to merge results from backup directory alongside original source dirs, deduplicating by filename/session_id.
• dataclaw/cli.py: Added shutil import, imported new backup dir constants, added backup_sessions() function and backup-sessions CLI subcommand.
• README.md: Added 'Preventing session deletion' section with backup-sessions usage, cron setup example, and tool configuration options (Claude Code cleanupPeriodDays: 0).
• tests/test_parser.py: Updated all _disable_* helpers to also monkeypatch CLAUDE_BACKUP_PROJECTS_DIR and GEMINI_BACKUP_DIR.

All 290 tests pass.

PR opened: peteromallet/dataclaw#18
Branch: fix/issue-16-prevent-session-deletion on xliry/dataclaw