Since there’s a new update every 3 minutes, I’m not sure if it was after a regular restart or after installing the update, but all my cursor rules (global, not project rules) are gone. Can’t find a trace of it in the .cursor folder either. Anybody had the same recently? Man man man, that was a ton of work I put in them. Do I really need to backup everything?
Can you open the .cursor folder (in your home directory) and check if there’s a rules subfolder or any files there? A screenshot of the folder contents would help us see where the data is.
What version were you on before updating to 2.4.23?
Did you do any backup/restore actions with your projects, or move the .cursor folder between machines?
About backups: Yeah, unfortunately it does make sense to back up the .cursor folder if your rules are important.
Send the info above and we’ll try to figure it out. If there’s no backup and the data is truly gone, that’s a serious issue.
UPDATE: I did another update to 2.4.27 and suddenly my rules are back! However the .cursor folder (in my home directory) still has no rules folder. Where are they stored? I want to back them up so this can’t happen again!
The .cursor directory has no rules folder currently
No idea what my previous version was. It feels like every other day there’s another update and most time I update to it, so probably the one you’ve released before.
Didn’t do any weird stuff beforehand. No re-installs, no restores, no folder moving. What I can say is that I did a device restart yesterday. Sorry I can’t help a lot here with debug info as it’s just normal workflows.
I didn’t do backups because of the rules, because I didn’t expect Cursor to delete it randomly.
Project Rules: These live in .cursor/rules inside the project. They’re version-controlled, so you can commit them to Git.
User Rules (global): These aren’t stored as a folder on your file system. They live in Cursor’s database, so the .cursor folder won’t contain a rules subfolder. That’s why you don’t see them there.
For backing up User Rules, there’s no built-in export or import right now. Workaround:
Copy their contents from the UI (Cursor Settings > Rules, Commands)
Save them into a separate file
Or move important rules into Project Rules (.cursor/rules) so they’re automatically in Git
As for rules disappearing and coming back, it looks like a sync glitch between versions. The team is aware of similar issues.
Let me know if they disappear again and share the exact versions before and after.
Definitely figure out how to put your ~/.cursor directory into Git. A lot of folks have a ‘dotfiles’ repository and then set up symlinks as necessary to wire things up, but keep all of your various settings in one place.
I struggled a bit with Cursor changing files in my ~/.cursor despite instructions, global rules, and more not to do it… I finally had to set the directory to read only which makes it more tedious for me to make changes but at least keeps Cursor’s fingers from it… so far at least, I suppose, until it decides that it should find a countermeasure to my defenses.