How to see what Claude Cowork changed in my folder

You’re investigating, not restoring

Most people who land here aren’t in panic mode — they just want to know what Cowork actually did. Maybe a file looks off. Maybe a number changed in a spreadsheet. Maybe you came back from lunch and noticed three new files you didn’t ask for. Before you decide whether to keep the changes or roll any of them back, the first job is simply to see them.

CoworkRestore is built around that read-first workflow. Every snapshot is a quiet, read-only record of what the folder looked like at a moment in time. Opening one tells you what changed between then and now. None of that browsing alters a file on disk.

Step-by-step: see what Cowork changed

1. Open CoworkRestore from the menu bar. Click the CoworkRestore icon in your Mac’s menu bar. The folders you’ve added show up in the list.
2. Pick the folder Cowork was working in. You’ll see its snapshot history with the most recent at the top.
3. Find the snapshots from the Cowork session. 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 and Safety tags from previous recovery actions. The ones you want are usually the Claude rows matching the time the session ran.
4. Open the snapshot to see the list of changed files. You’ll get every file that was added, modified, or deleted between that snapshot and the one before it — just the file paths and what happened to each one. No code wall, no guessing.
5. Click a file to see it before and after. The version saved in the snapshot sits next to the version on disk now. Read the change. Decide nothing yet.
6. Match the snapshot to a Cowork conversation when you can. When Cowork triggered the snapshot, CoworkRestore links the session and turn to the row. That lets you tie a specific change back to the exact request you asked Cowork to do — useful when you have several sessions in a day and can’t remember which one touched the file.

Narrowing down a long history

If you’ve been using Cowork in this folder for a while, the snapshot list can get long. Use the search box at the top of the history. It does a substring match over snapshot messages and changed file paths — so typing part of a filename, a folder name, or a word from the Cowork message will trim the list to just the snapshots that touched something matching.

Search does not look inside file contents. If you need to find “the snapshot where the heading text changed,” you still have to open snapshots and read the before/after view. The path search is for narrowing down, not for full-text recall.

Once you’ve seen what changed

Reading the changes is usually enough to settle the question. From there you have three honest options:

• Keep everything. Close CoworkRestore. Nothing you did while browsing changed a single file.
• Undo specific files. If a handful of the changes are wrong but the rest are fine, walk through how to undo only the bad files from a Cowork session. That’s the hub guide for keeping the good edits and rolling back the rest, file by file.
• Undo a folder cleanup that went the wrong way. If what you’re looking at is a Cowork organize-and-rename pass that went sideways — files moved into the wrong folders, names that don’t make sense — the playbook is a little different. Jump to Claude Cowork organized my folder wrong.

The point of looking first is that you don’t have to commit to a recovery plan before you understand what happened. Read the change. Then decide.