Deletes off your computer. I'm don't know what else they might be doing with it. They keep slimmed down summaries (on your comptuer) I believe but not the full context.

Then just copy the files into another directory, or maybe include it in a VCS?

Yep, that’s what I’m doing, a cron to copy them off to the side daily

Same worry got me to build pond for myself: it imports all of my sessions on a cron schedule every 5 mins into one store, and my agents can access it over MCP. Whenever I need a session from a while ago now, I just know it's in pond, because all of my sessions for about the last 1.5 years are collected in there. It also happens really often that when my agents cannot find something, they just call pond search themselves. Faster that way.

Codex, Pi, Hermes, Openclaw and bunch of others a getting pulled in automatically too. Repo: https://github.com/tenequm/pond

Extend the cleanup period to 2 years in ~/.claude/settings.json with

  "cleanupPeriodDays": 720

and for personal projects move all Claude Code memory to the repo, then add a symlink eg

  PROJ="$HOME/.claude/projects/-$(echo "${PWD#/}" | tr '/' '-')"
  DST="$PWD/.claude/memory"

  [ -d "$PROJ" ] || { echo "No project dir: $PROJ" >&2; exit 1; }; mkdir -p "$DST"
  if [ -d "$PROJ/memory" ] && [ ! -L "$PROJ/memory" ]; then mv "$PROJ/memory"/* "$DST"/; rmdir "$PROJ/memory"; fi
  ln -sfn "$DST" "$PROJ/memory"