Checkpoints are local to the machine and folder

Checkpoints are local to the specific machine and the specific folder they were created in. They are not synced to any server and do not depend on network access to restore from, since they are ordinary commit objects sitting in your own repository's local git database.

This also means checkpoints follow the normal lifetime of that repository exactly. Deleting the .git directory, or deleting the project folder entirely, removes every checkpoint stored in it along with everything else.

There is no separate backup of checkpoint data kept anywhere outside the repository itself; if you need checkpoints to survive a folder being deleted, that is a statement about backing up the repository generally, not something tCode manages independently.

Cloning a repository to a new machine or a fresh checkout does not bring old checkpoints along with it; checkpoints live specifically in the original repository's own local git database, not in anything that a normal clone or fetch would transfer.

This is a natural consequence of what a checkpoint actually is, a commit object in one specific local database, rather than a special exception tCode carves out; the same would be true of any local-only git ref in any repository.