Chat stuck on “Loading Chat” — cannot access previous conversation

marlonrousseau · November 26, 2025, 12:05pm

Hey all

There’s a straight forward solution to this, but it will require diagnosing the issue first to see which scenario it falls under from my initial comment on this post.

To effectively diagnose the issue, COPY my entire comment, the reply I’ve posted to Eric’s reply and this comment, and provide that to a new Agent/chat on Cursor IDE - make sure you have given Cursor access to reach/change files outside of your workspace because the metadata/general data related to your workspace is stored in your local PC in a different system location to where you have your codebase saved in your PC. Only information that are not stored in your local PC is your chat content which are stored in Cursor cloud. However, provided that you fix the workspace ID conflict, you may be able to fix this issue entirely by linking the ID associated with the metadata of the chat stored in cursor.

If cursor had made any update that changes the way metadata and chat data are stored, then it’s unlikely you can resolve this issue on your own as Cursor team need to relink them to your workspace ID. Although it’s worth a try to ask cursor agent to check the discrepancies between how the data was stored previously before and after the update. Then it will figure out the configuration chnages they have implemented in the new update. Atleast it will provide a holistic view of the issue you’re experiencing.

you won’t need to action any of this, make sure you provide all my responses to a single agent (open a new agent/chat), it will do the task for you.

if you encounter any issues, ping me here, I will look into it.

Cheers

Marlon

user1007 · November 27, 2025, 9:28am

@marlonrousseau

Thanks for your help.

I had to find your earlier reply by clicking your avatar and filtering just replies in this chat from you.
You just said “Not sure about Windows”. That’s not helpful! Lol. I am on Windows.
I am fairly sure that for most of us (at least for me), that this issue is scenario B since it started for many of us AFTER the update. What would it take for Cursor to run a test that checks if users chats are un-synced? I am pretty certain this is the case for me. The issue started immediately following the 2.0 update and has got DOUBLE messed up (see my report that was merged with this thread) after I tried installing 2.1 hoping it would fix it.

So… you have a bunch of users now that are waiting for their chats to be synced again with Cursor’s chat db so they can actually USE 2.x. Can something be done about this please?

dqminik · November 27, 2025, 6:55am

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

I downloaded the latest update not long ago. The plan creation tool kept failing so I restarted the app, because that fixed it before the update.

And now when I opened the application, I had to login again like I never used Cursor before, my previous chats are not loading in, and also some of my mcps arent loading in either or logged out…

Can I atleast open the last plan from my previous chat? Ive been working on that for hours, it would really ■■■■ to lose it all now like this… When I press on the history button on the chat section, I get that composer error, like all my history is gone (“[composer] No composer data handle found”)…

Steps to Reproduce

I am not sure, because I just restarted the application… Literally didnt do anything special. The Plan creation tool kept failing, and I recently updated to v2.1.39.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.1.39 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 60d42bed27e5775c43ec0428d8c653c49e58e260
Date: 2025-11-27T02:30:49.286Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

Giorgio · November 28, 2025, 1:28pm

In windows I cannot find some of what you said so I am struggling to reactivate my chats.

I can see a few state.vscdb from a few chats and some are big size so I know the chat exists.

I can see folders on workspaceStorage, several of them from different chats and projects
I can see state.vscdb and state.vscdb.backup, and they have the data
I can see workspace.json
I can see anysphere.cursor-retrieval folder

When I go to anysphere.cursor-retrieval folder I only see:

embeddable_files.txt
high_level_folder_description.txt

Nothing else is that folder so I don’t see any.json or .md files inside like you said.

But what I see in Cursor/User is History folders at
C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Cursor\User\History\
I see a lot of folders there and with different “Date Modified”

StevieG77 · November 28, 2025, 4:18pm

I asked Cursor and Opus 4.5 to analyse @marlonrousseau comment and below are the summarised findings after it created and executed lots of python scripts to analyse the contents of the local workspaceStorage files.

Technical Analysis: “Loading Chat” Issue on Windows - Root Cause Findings

Environment

Windows 11 Enterprise (Build 26100.7171)
Cursor 2.1.39 (latest version as of November 2025)

Problem

Chat history older than approximately 1-2 weeks shows perpetual “Loading Chat” and never loads.

Investigation Method

I used Python scripts with SQLite to analyse the Cursor database files in:

%APPDATA%\Cursor\User\workspaceStorage\*\state.vscdb (per-workspace databases)
%APPDATA%\Cursor\User\globalStorage\state.vscdb (global database)

Key Findings

1. Cursor Uses a Two-Tier Storage Architecture

Location	What’s Stored	Purpose
Workspace DBs (`workspaceStorage\*\state.vscdb`)	Chat metadata only (composerId, timestamps, titles) + rolling cache of prompts/responses in `aiService.prompts` and `aiService.generations`	Per-project data
Global DB (`globalStorage\state.vscdb`)	Recent message content in `cursorDiskKV` table with `bubbleId:{composerId}:{bubbleId}` keys	Shared chat content cache
Cursor Cloud	Full conversation history	Primary storage

2. Local Cache is Limited

In my case:

669 chat sessions referenced in workspace metadata
Only 17 conversations (from the last ~7 days) had message content in the global cursorDiskKV cache
1,785 prompts and 1,908 AI responses were stored locally in the aiService.* tables (but not linked to the chat UI)

3. Root Cause Identified

The “Loading Chat” issue occurs because:

The local cursorDiskKV cache only retains recent conversation content
Older conversations have metadata locally but require cloud retrieval for actual messages
The cloud retrieval is failing - either due to:
- Authentication/sync issues after a Cursor update
- Server-side data retention policies
- Schema changes breaking backwards compatibility

4. This is NOT a Workspace ID Mismatch Issue

I found no duplicate workspace IDs for the same folder. Opening folders consistently produces the same workspace ID. The issue is purely cloud sync/retrieval related.

What Data IS Recoverable Locally

The aiService.prompts and aiService.generations tables in each workspace database contain a rolling cache of prompts and responses with timestamps. This data exists but:

Is not organised into “conversations”
Is limited to approximately 100-300 entries per workspace
Cannot be displayed in the chat UI without the composer/bubble structure from the cloud

I was able to export 1,785 prompts and 1,908 AI responses from my local databases to markdown files - the content exists, it’s just not accessible through the chat UI.

Recommendations for Cursor Team

Increase local cache retention - The cursorDiskKV cache appears too aggressive in purging older conversations
Implement offline fallback - The aiService.* data could be used to reconstruct conversations when cloud retrieval fails
Add sync status indicators - Show users when chats are cloud-only vs locally cached
Provide export functionality - Allow users to export their chat history before it becomes inaccessible
Investigate cloud retrieval failures - The fundamental issue is that cloud sync is failing silently

Workaround for Users

Sign out and back in to refresh authentication tokens
Create .code-workspace files for projects and always open via those files (prevents future workspace ID issues)
Export local data using SQLite queries if you need to recover what’s stored locally

Scripts Used

I can share the Python analysis scripts if helpful for the Cursor engineering team to reproduce and investigate.

The “Loading Chat” issue is caused by Cursor’s local cache purging older conversation content, combined with cloud retrieval failing. The data structure exists locally (metadata + some raw prompts/responses) but the cloud-dependent composer/bubble system needed for the chat UI cannot retrieve older conversations. This is a server-side/sync issue, not a local configuration problem.

I keep backups everyday of my PC and I can see the global state.vscdb on 21/11/2025 was massive compared to the day after the update:

The Cursor update basically reset this local global db cache.

How do we fix this Cursor support?

StevieG77 · November 28, 2025, 4:54pm

I’ve managed to get all of my chat history back.
Cursor created a Python script to merge my restored 1.4GB backup of state.vscdb with the current 30MB version with my past week’s worth of chats in.
I now have all of my chat history visible and it can be opened.

Not sure what you can do if you don’t have a backup of your state.vscdb
One for Cursor support to answer if they ever reply to this thread before Christmas.

koroldemonov · November 29, 2025, 5:10am