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Handshake is designed from the ground up to keep your session data on your machine. There are no accounts, no cloud sync, and no telemetry of any kind. The daemon binds to localhost only and never makes outbound connections. Your conversations stay on your hardware.
No cloud. No accounts. No data leaving your machine.

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What Is Stored

Handshake writes two types of data to your machine: Session database — stored at ~/.handshake/sessions.db (SQLite). Each checkpointed session contains:
  • Session title, agent name, and working directory
  • The full message history (user and assistant turns)
  • Model name and timestamps
  • An optional handoff summary and decisions written by the checkpointing agent
  • A git state snapshot (branch, commit hash, dirty files) captured at checkpoint time
Agent registration files — Handshake adds itself as an MCP server to each agent’s config file during setup. The exact file location varies by agent. These entries point to http://localhost:8765/mcp (or whichever port you configured). Handshake does not store API keys, credentials, or auth tokens of any kind.

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Network Access

The Handshake daemon binds exclusively to localhost:8765. It is not accessible from the network — only processes on your own machine can connect to it. Handshake makes no outbound connections. It never contacts external servers, sends usage data, or checks for updates over the network. Once installed, it operates entirely offline.

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Data Location

All session data is stored in a single SQLite file: 
~/.handshake/sessions.db
This is a standard SQLite database. You can back up or migrate it with any SQLite-compatible tool: 
# Copy to a backup
cp ~/.handshake/sessions.db ~/Documents/handshake-backup.db

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Deleting Your Data

To remove all session data, run the uninstall command and choose to delete the database when prompted: 
handshake uninstall
Handshake will ask: 
Delete session database? Your session history will be lost. [y/N]
Answer y to delete ~/.handshake/ and everything in it. Alternatively, delete the directory manually at any time — Handshake does not re-create it until the next handshake init or handshake setup run: 
rm -rf ~/.handshake
For more details on the full uninstall process, see the Uninstall guide.