I rebooted my win10 laptop and just now opened cursor and it acted like it has never been configured??? All my chats and composer history is completely gone! It’s asking to setup the environment, import extensions from vs code, and trying to do the walk through with me. Is there a way to view were history should be saved? Is there anyway to get it back? Need help asap.
Hi @arcria
There might’ve been a glitch, or your antivirus might’ve quarantined all the related files. If you didn’t delete anything, you can find all the necessary files here:
%APPDATA%\Cursor
and %USERPROFILE%\.cursor
the exact same thing happen to me. didn’t even reboot, just shut down cursor and restarted and all histories are gone.
I see lots of files under those directories. what do i do when I find them? just open them with sqlite and fish for what I’m looking for? or is there a way to restore it back in cursor?
ooh and it gets weirder, I had cursor on 2 computers. BOTH their histories are gone. could this be something systemic?
on 2 separate computers, i shut down cursor, restart, and histories are gone. how can that happen?
guys, this is not a simple thing! I expect a reply!
my WHOLE history is gone. all of my composer history consisted of ongoing conversations about various components in the app I’m developing.
This is a big setback for me. Seems like you have a fix (although you didn’t explain what anybody should do. I’m looking at the folders you talk about and I have no idea on how to restore the history).
I know that the software is buggy, and we are using at our own risk. But this is a SERIOUS issue. history lost on 2 computers at the same time?? how can that even be possible?
Hey, there shouldn’t be anything causing the deletion of your history, especially on two devices. Do you have any anti-virus programs on your machines that may have modified these files?
Hey, did you do any actions here, like renaming a folder or installing a new update?
My stupid Win forced me to install the latest update and I did it. I haven’t deleted anything yet, only loaded Cursor right after reboot.
These were the updates it installed:
2025-01 Cumulative Update for .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.8.1 for Windows 11, version 23H2 for x64 (KB5049624)
and
2025-01 Cumulative Update for Windows 11 Version 23H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5050021)
@danperks, from your previous post I understand that in my case the chat history is unrecoverable (due to potential interception by these security updates), right?
If that’s the case, then what are the BEST PRACTICES recommended for Cursor users not to lose history in such seemingly idiotic ways? It seems that many users are out there facing the same issues regularly. I’ve already lost the history the second time in the past few months. Is this going to be an ongoing issue?
The best practice here, at least from my own experience, is to extract the high level knowledge about a codebase into a file / set of files. This means you no longer rely on the chat / composer history to contain the knowledge the AI needs to make good code edits, but instead provides you with a file you can @ in a brand new session to get the AI up to speed quickly.
You can get the Composer to build this automatically, with some prompting to do so, e.g. “Update the overview.md
file to include any information you have learnt from our chat so far” could be a way to do this.
This has been discussed before, see also the proposed extension there (specstory) which backs up the chat into .md files and works quite well.
However none of those workarounds is necessary if you have a proper backup setup on your computer.
This is a really valuable tip, mate. Thank you!
Luckily, just before the crash/reboot/loss, I installed the SpecStory and I can actually have all the previous chats as MD files (so no, I haven’t experienced permanent loss) which I already Imported into my Notion, so I can have them beautifully formatted the way I want to, and use when working in a new session, etc.
This loss actually worked out to be good in the end lol. Or even better! Because I now “discovered” a new/better flow for working with the historic chats, able to search through them, and as @danperks suggested - to @ in a session the .md file as part of the documentation for the Agent to work with.
I’m glad this happened! haha
Ah, if you’ve lost your history during or after installing SpecStory, that could be the cause as it’s closed source, so we have no idea what it does to the files inside Cursor!
They slurp the tables for CHAT and EDIT from the VSCDB into their own thing. I wrote stuff to slurp to postgres in realtime and provide search on the context…
However, wheneveryou point the agents to the .vscdb, frequently it gets itself into a loop determining the format of the blob, json etc…
Would you please share the [whatever] you guys do WRT schema, writing to/reading the Composer CHAT/EDIT data from the files?