Pressing F1 > “Show Chat History“ doesn’t do anything
On the “Agents“ tab I can see some of my most recent chats, but the ones that I had earlier are still not there.
I’m launching Cursor from Windows and connecting to WSL.
I do have files in %APPDATA%\Cursor\User\workspaceStorage. 3 folders with state.vscdb, state.vscdb.backup and workspace.json. One of the folders also have another folder called `anysphere.cursor-retrieval` with embeddable_files and high_level_folder_description.
One thing that might be important that I found out is that Cursor auto-updated on my second day of usage, and the lost chats were all made on my first day. Chats made after the update are still here.
The issue is that when Cursor updates, it migrates chat data to a new format. If something goes wrong during that process, like not enough disk space or a migration error, the data can get lost. Chats created after the update still work because they’re already in the new format.
Let’s try to recover them:
Check the backup file:
Go to %APPDATA%\Cursor\User\globalStorage\ (Windows)
Find state.vscdb.backup
Check the modified date. If it’s close to the day you had those chats, it might still contain the data
Fully close Cursor
Copy state.vscdb somewhere safe first, in case it has newer chats you want to keep
Rename state.vscdb.backup to state.vscdb
Open Cursor and check
If the backup is empty or missing, sadly it’s most likely not possible to get those chats back. The team knows about this WSL issue and data migrations during updates, but there’s no fix yet.
For next time:
Keep an eye on free disk space. This is a common cause of data loss during updates
You can install SpecStory. It lets you export chats
Let me know if the backup helped. Also tell me if you want help recovering chats from the DB, I can help.
