PhpStorm Local History retention scope for large projects and excluded directories

Local History as a short-term recovery net

I am relying on PhpStorm's Local History to recover earlier file states, including restoring deleted files that were never committed to Git and verifying recovered content through the built-in diff viewer against the current version. Labels help me mark states before risky refactors, and restoration works at file, fragment, or directory level.

Where the configuration is unclear

What I cannot pin down is the retention boundary. Snapshots are stored per project in the IDE system directory rather than inside the project, and retention is both time-limited and size-limited. In a large project with heavy daily edits, I do not know whether the size cap can silently evict snapshots well before the day limit, or how excluded directories affect coverage. Since clearing IDE caches removes the history entirely, I want to understand exactly what survives and for how long before treating it as my safety net for uncommitted work.

Assume a recent PhpStorm release with default settings.

• Does the size limit cause older snapshots to be discarded earlier than the configured day retention, and can both limits be tuned independently in Settings?
• Are files under excluded directories recorded at all, or only partially?
• Is there a practical way to confirm which snapshots currently exist for a project without browsing each file's history individually?