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Claude Cowork changed my whole folder — how do I undo only the bad files?

Hub guide: review what Claude Cowork changed, keep the good edits, undo the bad ones — file by file.

Updated June 13, 2026

The short version

If CoworkRestore was watching the folder, every Cowork task is bracketed by save points. Open the snapshot from just before the task, review the changed files, and either rewind the whole folder or restore the bad files one at a time — keeping every edit you actually liked.

You don’t have to choose between “accept everything” and “throw it all away.”

How CoworkRestore brackets a Cowork session

CoworkRestore is a Mac menu-bar app that saves snapshots of any folder you add to it. When you let it install its small extension into Claude Desktop, Cowork pings it before and after each task — giving you the cleanest possible save points around every change. You never have to mention CoworkRestore in your prompts; it stays out of the way and handles save points in the background.

That means a typical Cowork session leaves you with a save point from the moment before Cowork started, a save point from the moment after it finished, and the changed-files list between them. That’s the surface you work from.

The step-by-step: keep the good edits, undo the bad ones

  1. Open CoworkRestore from the menu bar. Click the icon in your Mac’s menu bar and select the project folder Cowork was working in. You’ll see its snapshot history — most recent at the top.
  2. Find the snapshot from just before Cowork started. Each snapshot is tagged with what triggered it — claude for Cowork-driven save points, auto for the filesystem watcher, manual for ones you took yourself, plus restore, safety, and undo-restore for the recovery history. Look for the claude tag with the timestamp matching the start of the task that went sideways. If the session has a message or links to a Cowork turn, you can search by it.
  3. Open the snapshot to see what changed. You’ll get the list of every file that was added, modified, or deleted between that snapshot and now — not a wall of code, just the file paths and what happened to each one.
  4. For each file, view it before and after. Click a row to see the version saved in the snapshot next to the version currently on disk. This is where you decide: keep the new one, or roll this specific file back.
  5. Restore the bad files one at a time. On any row you want to undo, use Restore this file. It brings that one file back to the version in the snapshot — and if the file didn’t exist at that snapshot, the per-file restore will delete the version Cowork added. Every other file stays exactly as Cowork left it.
  6. Or rewind the entire folder. If Cowork made a mess of nearly everything, skip the file-by-file work and use Restore this entire snapshot. The whole folder goes back to that point in time.
  7. If the restore was wrong, undo the restore. Every whole-snapshot restore takes a safety snapshot of the current state first. The Undo last restore button stays available right up until the next snapshot lands on top — so you can experiment without losing your place.

The three moves, plainly

Three buttons cover almost every recovery from a Cowork session:

  • Per-file restore— bring one file back to the snapshot version. The rest of the folder is untouched.
  • Whole-snapshot restore— rewind the entire folder to a point in time.
  • Undo last restore— reverse a whole-snapshot restore from the safety snapshot it just took.

What CoworkRestore can and cannot recover

  • Can: restore any file, in any version, from any folder it was actively watching when Cowork ran.
  • Cannot: recover anything from before CoworkRestore was installed, or from before you added the folder.
  • Cannot: recover changes that happened while the project was paused — there are no snapshots from that gap.
  • Cannot: recover files that were never inside the watched folder, or files matched by the excludes list (defaults skip node_modules, .DS_Store, build output, caches, and similar).
  • Cannot: replace Time Machine or a full-disk backup. It watches the project folders you choose, locally, on your Mac.

Where to go next

If you’re not yet sure the changes are wrong — or you just want to look before you touch anything — start with how to see what Claude Cowork changed in your folder. If the problem is a cleanup that moved or renamed files in the wrong way, the folder-organization variant lives at Claude Cowork organized my folder wrong. If files are outright missing, jump to Claude Cowork deleted my files.

The save points are the whole point. Every change is reviewable. Every change is reversible. Configure once, then forget it’s there until the day you need it.