Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?
Cursor IDE
Describe the Bug
all chat history seems to be hidden, inaccessible, deleted?.
Steps to Reproduce
yesterday i had a lot of chats, like several months worth of history, today after updating no more history in any project or workspace
Expected Behavior
chat history should stay available
Screenshots / Screen Recordings
Operating System
Linux
Version Information
Version: 3.1.17
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: fce1e9ab7844f9ea35793da01e634aa7e50bce90
Date: 2026-04-19T19:33:58.189Z
Layout: editor
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.8.1
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.1
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Linux x64 6.19.11-200.fc43.x86_64
Does this stop you from using Cursor
No - Cursor works, but with this issue
actually this is really annoying i had prepared several agent plans to run today and i cant access them anymore
Hi JW,
This is a known issue that can happen after updating. Your chat data is almost certainly still saved on disk – it’s just not showing up in the sidebar.
Chat transcripts are stored locally at ~/.cursor/projects/{workspace-slug}/agent-transcripts/. To check if your data is still there, open a terminal and run:
ls ~/.cursor/projects/
You should see folders for your workspaces. Inside each, there should be an agent-transcripts/ directory with your chat history files (.jsonl files).
The most common cause after an update is the workspace identity changing slightly, which makes Cursor look in a different directory. A few things to try:
-
Close and reopen your project using File > Open Folder and selecting the exact same folder path you were using before the update
-
Reload the window – Ctrl+Shift+P > Developer: Reload Window
-
If you see multiple similar-looking folders in ~/.cursor/projects/, one of them likely contains your old transcripts – you can compare timestamps to find the right one
You may also find this related thread helpful: No history after update 3.1.17 – same version, same symptom.
Our team is aware of this class of issues and actively working on it. Let me know if the files are there or if you need help recovering them.
There is a lot of stuff in ~/.cursor/projects but most are empty dirs or have a canvases or mcps dir thats empty. Some dirs have some agent-transcripts but idk how i can get these files back in cursor, should i copy them in or something?
Reloading doesnt seem to change anything, opening a workspace file doesnt show any history, opening a project folder that i opened in the past doesnt show any history either.
Since you can see agent-transcripts/ files in some of those directories, the data is still there – it’s just not being picked up by the sidebar index.
One thing worth trying: open a new agent chat in Cursor and ask it to help you locate and consolidate your transcript files. Something like “find all my agent transcript files under ~/.cursor/projects/ and list them by date.” The agent has shell access and can quickly scan through those directories to find where your actual work lives, which might save you a lot of manual digging.
Beyond that, the underlying issue (sidebar not re-indexing old sessions after an update) is being tracked by our team. Unfortunately there’s no manual “reimport” step available right now – the transcripts exist on disk but the sidebar index doesn’t know about them after the workspace identity changed during the update.
I’ll keep this thread updated if a fix ships that restores the index automatically.
