This is a serious product failure that needs to be treated as such, not a feature request.
When the Claude desktop app requires a reinstall for any reason — crash, corruption, update failure — the result is total, unrecoverable loss of everything a user has built in Cowork:
All scheduled tasks, gone
All MCP connections (PayPal, Gmail, and others), gone
All plugin configuration, gone
Documents Cowork was actively managing, gone
All history, gone
There is no export. There is no backup. There is no cloud sync. There is no recovery path of any kind.
I am told a configuration file exists on my machine, but the app cannot or will not access it after reinstall due to filesystem restrictions — which means the data physically exists on my computer and I still cannot get it back. That is not a security feature. That is a trap.
This happened to me as a paying Max subscriber. I had infrastructure built up over time — scheduled automation, active MCP connections, and a customer-facing document Cowork was managing — and all of it was wiped in one reinstall event with no warning and no recourse.
This is a data loss bug. The fact that Cowork operates on the local filesystem makes this worse, not better — because it creates the illusion that data is safe on the user's machine while making it inaccessible in practice.
What needs to happen:
Configuration and task data must survive reinstall — whether via cloud sync, a portable export/import function, or storing configs in a user-accessible location the app can reliably find again
Users must be warned before any action that would destroy their configuration
A recovery path must exist for users who have already lost data
Paying subscribers are building real workflows and storing real business data in this tool. Losing all of it because the app had a bad day is unacceptable.
This is a serious product failure that needs to be treated as such, not a feature request.
When the Claude desktop app requires a reinstall for any reason — crash, corruption, update failure — the result is total, unrecoverable loss of everything a user has built in Cowork:
All scheduled tasks, gone
All MCP connections (PayPal, Gmail, and others), gone
All plugin configuration, gone
Documents Cowork was actively managing, gone
All history, gone
There is no export. There is no backup. There is no cloud sync. There is no recovery path of any kind.
I am told a configuration file exists on my machine, but the app cannot or will not access it after reinstall due to filesystem restrictions — which means the data physically exists on my computer and I still cannot get it back. That is not a security feature. That is a trap.
This happened to me as a paying Max subscriber. I had infrastructure built up over time — scheduled automation, active MCP connections, and a customer-facing document Cowork was managing — and all of it was wiped in one reinstall event with no warning and no recourse.
This is a data loss bug. The fact that Cowork operates on the local filesystem makes this worse, not better — because it creates the illusion that data is safe on the user's machine while making it inaccessible in practice.
What needs to happen:
Configuration and task data must survive reinstall — whether via cloud sync, a portable export/import function, or storing configs in a user-accessible location the app can reliably find again
Users must be warned before any action that would destroy their configuration
A recovery path must exist for users who have already lost data
Paying subscribers are building real workflows and storing real business data in this tool. Losing all of it because the app had a bad day is unacceptable.