I’m reporting a data-loss issue with Cursor chat history.
What happened:
All chat/conversation history for one specific project/workspace is missing. When I open that project, previous chats no longer appear in the chat sidebar.
What still works:
Other projects/workspaces show their chat history as expected. The problem appears isolated to this one project.
Steps to Reproduce
Open the affected project.
Open the Chat/Composer sidebar.
Observe that all prior conversations are gone.
Expected Behavior
Chat history for this project should persist across sessions, like my other projects.
After an update, the sidebar index that maps chats to their titles can get overwritten for a specific workspace, which is why you’re seeing “New Chat” entries instead of your actual titles. The good news is the underlying chat data is almost certainly still on disk.
To check, open a terminal and run:
ls ~/.cursor/projects/
Find the folder matching your affected project — inside it, check for an agent-transcripts/ directory with .jsonl files. If those files exist, your conversation data is preserved on disk even though the sidebar isn’t showing it.
A couple of things worth trying:
Reload the window - Cmd+Shift+P > Developer: Reload Window
Reopen the project using File > Open Folder with the exact same folder path you were using before the update
Our team is tracking this and working on a fix. Unfortunately there’s no manual reimport step available right now.
You may also find this related thread helpful - other users reported the same issue with additional recovery details.
Can you solve the issue with historical conversations?? The workspace feature, you either disable it, or it will cause users to lose their sessions after using it, and this is still the case in the latest version.
An annoying bug, prompting people to complain. The issue of losing workspace sessions is an old problem.
@superjinge the chat data is usually still on disk even when the sidebar stops showing it. Quit Cursor fully (Cmd+Q), then look in ~/.cursor/projects/ for the folder matching that project and check for an agent-transcripts/ directory with .jsonl files. If they’re there, your conversations are preserved. Reopen the project via File > Open Folder using the exact same path as before, then reload the window (Cmd+Shift+P > Developer: Reload Window), which often re-attaches the history.
This isn’t intended behavior and it’s an issue we’re tracking. I’ve let the team know it’s still coming up on 3.20.10. There’s no manual reimport step yet, so if those steps don’t bring it back, reply with what you see in that folder and I’ll look into your case.
