Prevent Disk Bloat: Session Maintenance and Transcript Archival in OpenClaw 2026.2.17

If you've been running OpenClaw for a while, you've probably noticed your sessions directory growing steadily. Every conversation creates transcript files, media attachments accumulate, and before you know it you're wondering why your VPS is running low on disk space.

OpenClaw 2026.2.17 introduces significant improvements to session maintenance that help keep your disk usage under control automatically.

The Disk Leak Problem

Prior to this release, OpenClaw had a subtle issue: when pruning stale sessions, the system would delete session metadata but could leave behind:

• Transcript JSONL files - Your conversation history, which can grow quite large over time
• Media files in subdirectories - Images, audio files, and other attachments
• Deleted archive files - Files marked .deleted that never got cleaned up

For busy agents handling lots of conversations, this meant gradual disk bloat that required manual intervention to fix.

What's New in 2026.2.17

The session maintenance system now handles cleanup comprehensively:

1. Transcript Archival

When pruning stale sessions, transcripts are now properly archived before deletion. This gives you a grace period to recover conversations if needed while ensuring eventual cleanup.

2. Media Subdirectory Cleanup

Expired media files in session subdirectories are now cleaned automatically. Those voice messages, images, and file attachments your agent processed months ago won't stick around forever.

3. Deleted Archive Purging

The .deleted transcript archives are now purged after the configured prune window. No more zombie files taking up space indefinitely.

Security Bonus: File Permissions

This release also addresses transcript file security:

# New transcripts are created with restrictive permissions
-rw------- (0o600) - User-only read/write

Your conversation history is sensitive data. The new default permissions ensure other users on shared systems can't read your transcripts.

Already have existing transcripts with loose permissions? Run:

openclaw security audit --fix

This will remediate existing transcript file permissions across your sessions directory.

Related GitHub Issues

This improvement was tracked in #18538.

Takeaways

If you're running OpenClaw on a VPS or any storage-constrained environment:

1. Update to 2026.2.17 to benefit from automatic cleanup
2. Run openclaw security audit --fix to fix permissions on existing transcripts
3. Check your sessions directory before and after to see the difference

No more manually cleaning up after your agent. OpenClaw now handles the housekeeping so you can focus on building useful automations.