This morning I clicked the update button in the bottom-left corner of Cursor. After the update to 3.23.5 applied and Cursor restarted, all unpinned chats disappeared from the left sidebar. Pinned chats are still visible. My agent can reference chats I had earlier this morning but clicking any link gives “Chat not found.”
Steps to Reproduce
Steps to reproduce:
Have many unpinned chats in sidebar
Click the update button in the bottom-left corner
Cursor updates to 3.23.5 and restarts
All unpinned chat history is gone from sidebar — only pinned chats remain
Expected Behavior
Expected behavior: Chat history survives an update/restart.
Dug into Cursor’s SQLite files after a restart wiped the sidebar. Here’s exactly what’s happening:
Two composerHeaders tables exist:
globalStorage/state.vscdb → 554 rows (397 belonging to my workspace, all intact, including today’s sessions)
workspaceStorage/[workspace-id]/state.vscdb → 0 rows (empty after restart)
The sidebar reads from the workspace-specific table. After the restart, that table was cleared. The global table retained everything — so all the chat content is safe, but the sidebar shows nothing because its index is gone.
Additional observations:
The workspace DB backup file dates from May 14 and is smaller than the current DB, so the backup can’t restore the sidebar state
New chats created after the restart are still being written to the global DB correctly, but the workspace-level table stays at 0 rows
Closing and reopening the workspace doesn’t fix it
Repro: Quit Cursor, reopen, open workspace → sidebar shows no chat history despite all data being present in globalStorage/state.vscdb
Ask: Can Cursor re-populate the workspace-level composerHeaders from global on startup when it detects the workspace table is empty? Or at minimum, fall back to reading from global when the workspace index is empty?
Hey @mwjcie1, thanks for the report, and sorry about the scare.
Your chats are very likely still saved on your Mac. The global header data you found, plus the agent still being able to reference earlier conversations, both point that way. Please don’t delete or reset anything in Cursor’s app data folder while we investigate.
Could you try this and tell me what you see?
Open a normal IDE editor window with the same project folder.
Press Cmd+P.
Type chat: followed by a word from a missing chat title, for example chat: My Chat. It should auto-populate with suggested chat titles, so it’s okay if you don’t remember an exact name.
Check whether the missing chat appears and whether it opens.
Also helpful:
Roughly how many chats were pinned when this happened
Whether any unpinned chats remain visible after restarting
Whether newly created chats appear in the Agents Window sidebar
Run Capture and Send Debugging Data from the Command Palette immediately after reproducing the issue. If it saves a zip locally, please share that zip.
This will help distinguish a chat-list loading issue from missing chat data. Thank you! Don’t feel you need to provide each piece of info just whatever you can is helpful!
