Agents panel / right sidebar lost session list – no way to restore

Support Bug Reports
1

Describe the Bug

The Agents panel (right sidebar) used to show a list of recent agent sessions. That list has disappeared. The session data (transcripts) still exists on disk, but there is no way to restore or re-populate the sidebar from it.

Steps to Reproduce

I was trying to improve performance and it happened during that process

Expected Behavior

The Agents panel should display recent agent sessions with:

  • Session title (often derived from the first user message)
  • Timestamp (e.g., “1m”, “20h”)
  • Diff stats (+additions, -deletions, file count)
  • Ability to click and resume or view past sessions

Actual Behavior

The Agents panel is empty (or shows only the current session). Previously visible sessions—including ones with substantial work (e.g., “GLIC account email syst…”, “Email system managem…”)—no longer appear in the list.

What Was Lost

  • Agent sessions with titles like “[client] account email syst…” and “Email system managem…” including their timestamps and diff stats

What Still Exists

  • Agent transcripts are intact at:
    • %USERPROFILE%\.cursor\projects\<project-id>\agent-transcripts\<session-id>\<session-id>.jsonl
  • MCFS connections are still in settings.json under mcfs.connections
  • No data loss; only the UI list was cleared

Possible Causes (Suspected)

  • Cursor update
  • Workspace switch
  • Storage/cache reset
  • Internal state migration

Request

  1. Restore the sidebar list from existing transcript metadata if possible
  2. Add a “Restore from transcripts” or similar feature to re-populate the Agents panel from on-disk transcripts
  3. Improve persistence so the session list survives updates and workspace changes

Additional Context

User has 25+ agent transcript files across multiple projects. All contain valid conversation history. The sidebar previously showed these sessions but no longer does. There is no documented way to restore the list.

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Version Information

Environment

  • OS: Windows 10/11
  • Cursor version: Version: 2.5.26 (system setup)
    VSCode Version: 1.105.1
    Commit: 7d96c2a03bb088ad367615e9da1a3fe20fbbc6a0
    Date: 2026-02-26T04:57:56.825Z
    Build Type: Stable
    Release Track: Default
    Electron: 39.4.0
    Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
    Node.js: 22.22.0
    V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
    OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22631
  • Workspace: Documents folder (multi-root workspace)

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

4

This most likely happened because the workspace storage database (state.vscdb) was cleared or corrupted during the performance tuning. Along with other data, Cursor stores the session list (which conversations appear in the sidebar) inside SQLite files called state.vscdb (one per workspace), and unfortunately, there’s no built-in way to rebuild that list once it’s gone.

These files live under the Cursor user data directory:

  • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/User/workspaceStorage/<workspace-id>/state.vscdb
  • Windows: %APPDATA%\Cursor\User\workspaceStorage\<workspace-id>\state.vscdb
  • Linux: ~/.config/Cursor/User/workspaceStorage/<workspace-id>/state.vscdb

Cursor does maintain a state.vscdb.backup alongside each database, but if space was being cleared, that’s likely gone too.

The good news is the agent transcripts folder has already been found. Those are the raw conversation logs and they’re independent of the session list. Your user might find it useful to point the Cursor at that folder and ask to summarize each transcript, search for specific conversations, or answer any other questions about what was discussed. Not quite the same as having the sidebar back, but the content itself won’t be lost.

6

Thanks for the explanation. I’m referencing the transcripts and that has worked fine.

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