Chat history gone after PC restart — agent-transcripts files emptied; how to recover?

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

On Windows, after a slow machine and a full restart, some Cursor chat history disappeared. In %USERPROFILE%.cursor\projects<project>\agent-transcripts<chat-id>, the id folder still exists, but the .jsonl files for that day(which I reboot pc) are missing . Could you clarify where chats are stored, what can cause transcript files to be cleared, and whether there is any supported recovery path (local backup, sync, or otherwise)?

Steps to Reproduce

  1. After using Cursor IDE some days, quit Cursor IDE and reboot.
  2. Open IDE and found not chat history in Chat Panel.

Not consistently reproducible.

Expected Behavior

I’d like to recover my chat history.

Operating System

Linux

Version Information

Version: 2.5.25 (system setup)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 7150844152b426ed50d2b68dd6b33b5c5beb73c0
Date: 2026-02-24T07:17:49.417Z
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 10.0.26200

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

5

Hey, this is a known issue. A few users have reported losing chat history after a reboot. More details here: Disappearing chat history

Quick answers to your requests:

Where chats are stored: Transcripts are stored locally in %USERPROFILE%\.cursor\projects\<project>\agent-transcripts\, and chat metadata is in state.vscdb. There is no server copy.

Why the files disappeared: Writing transcripts to disk is not atomic. If the machine was slow and rebooted during a write, the files could end up empty or be lost.

Recovery: Unfortunately, there is no supported way to recover lost transcripts. The data is fully local and is not synced to any server.

One more thing. You’re on version 2.5.25 (Feb 2026), which is fairly old. Since then, chat persistence has been improved. I’d recommend updating to the latest version to reduce the chance of this happening again.

The team is aware of the issue, and your report helps us prioritize it.