OpenClaw Agent Loses Context After Restart

Symptoms

• After Agent restart, cannot access previous conversation history
• memory_search returns empty or outdated results
• Task was in progress, needs to restart after reboot

Quick Diagnosis (30 seconds)

Check 1: Session Configuration

# View current Session config
cat ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json | grep -A 5 'session'

Check 2: Session Files Exist

# Check Session storage directory
ls -la ~/.openclaw/agents/*/sessions/

Check 3: dmScope Setting

# Check DM isolation config
grep 'dmScope' ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json

Problem Confirmation

• If dmScope is main, all conversations share same session, may confuse after restart
• If Session files are empty or missing, persistence is not working

Solutions

Solution 1: Enable Session Persistence (Recommended, 2 minutes)

Edit ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json:

{
  "session": {
    "dmScope": "per-channel-peer",
    "maintenance": {
      "mode": "enforce",
      "pruneAfter": "30d"
    }
  }
}

Restart Gateway to apply:

openclaw gateway restart

Solution 2: Manual Session Recovery (Emergency, 5 minutes)

If Session files exist but Agent didn't load:

# 1. Find recent Session files
ls -lt ~/.openclaw/agents/*/sessions/*.jsonl | head -5

# 2. Check Session content
head -20 ~/.openclaw/agents/*/sessions/{session-id}.jsonl

Specify Session ID on Agent startup (advanced):

openclaw sessions restore {session-id}

Prevention

Configuration

• Set dmScope: per-channel-peer for session isolation
• Set maintenance.mode: enforce for auto session maintenance
• Set maintenance.pruneAfter: 30d to keep 30 days history

Best Practices

• Write important info to MEMORY.md promptly
• Save long task progress to file periodically
• Use memory_flush to persist at critical points

Related Errors

• OpenClaw Session Isolation Failure
• OpenClaw Memory Search Empty
• OpenClaw Bootstrap Not Loaded

References

• OpenClaw Docs - Session Management
• OpenClaw Docs - Memory System
• OpenClaw GitHub - Configuration Examples