OpenClaw Restart Task Progress Explained

OpenClaw Restart Task Progress Explained | Generated by AI

Home 2026.03

Question: When OpenClaw is restarted while a task is running, will it lose progress or can it resume the task?

Answer:

This depends on how OpenClaw handles task state persistence. Let me search for the latest info.—

Question: When OpenClaw is restarted while a task is running, will it lose progress or can it resume the task?

Answer:

What Happens When OpenClaw Restarts Mid-Task

Short answer: It does NOT auto-resume in-flight work. But progress is not fully lost either — here’s the full picture:

What Gets Preserved ✅

Session history is persisted to disk (~/.openclaw), so the conversation and context survive a restart.
Files written to disk (e.g., your Flask backend files in /home/lzw/.openclaw/workspace/pro-todo/backend) are fully safe — a restart does not delete them.
Memory files persist until you manually delete them.
Cron jobs survive restarts and keep running.

What Gets Lost / Interrupted ❌

OpenClaw does not replay “in-flight” work after a Gateway restart. The session history is persisted, but events are not replayed after a disconnect/restart, so the agent needs a new trigger to run again.
Any actively running shell command or background process that was mid-execution will be killed.

How to Resume After Restart

Option 1 — Manual resume (simplest): After a restart, just send a new message in the same chat like “continue” or “resume from where you left off.” Because session history is persisted, the agent has full context of what it was doing.

Option 2 — Automatic resume via Cron: Set up a cron job that periodically posts a system event into the main session (“if anything is incomplete, continue”). Cron jobs persist across restarts.

Option 3 — Auto-resume on Gateway boot via Hooks: If your requirement is “whenever the Gateway restarts, automatically do X,” look at Hooks — specifically the bundled BOOT.md hook. You can put your “startup checklist / resume logic” in BOOT.md to inspect recent sessions and re-trigger work.

⚠️ Special Warning: Extended Thinking Bug

If you were in the middle of a complex session using the /think directive (extended thinking), a restart can cause 400 errors — the session may appear stuck in a permanently broken state. This is a known documented bug related to thinking blocks in session persistence.

To be safe before restarting: run /compact in the chat to compress session state, or run /think off to disable extended thinking.

For Your Flask Backend Task Specifically

Since files were being written to /home/lzw/.openclaw/workspace/pro-todo/backend:

✅ All files already written to disk are safe
After restart, just say “continue building the Flask backend” and it will pick up from where it left off using the session history + existing files on disk

References:

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