Chats missing in IDE sidebar but visible in Agents window after Windows PC migration

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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

I just moved all my Cursor files from an old Windows 10 laptop to a new Windows 11 laptop. The folder paths and usernames are exactly the same. The weird part is that the separate Agents window shows all my old chats perfectly, but the actual IDE chat sidebar is completely blank and won’t load anything. How can this be?

Steps to Reproduce

Copy the %APPDATA%\Cursor and %USERPROFILE%\.cursor folders from an old Windows 10 PC to a new Windows 11 PC.

Move the project folders to the new PC, keeping the exact same usernames and folder paths.

Open Cursor on the new PC.

Open a project folder and try to open the standard IDE chat sidebar (Ctrl + L) or click “Show Chat History.”

Expected Behavior

The IDE chat sidebar should load and display the historical project chats transferred from the old computer, just like the standalone Agents window does.

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Version Information

Version: 3.15.6 (system setup)
VS Code Extension API: 1.128.0
Commit: a1f686545fd0ce8917bbd2449f733551a9bce420
Date: 2026-08-06T01:41:03.876Z
Layout: IDE
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 40.10.3
Chromium: 144.0.7559.236
Node.js: 24.15.0
V8: 14.4.258.32-electron.0
xterm.js: 6.1.0-beta.291
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26200

Additional Information

The data is completely intact on the hard drive because the separate Agents window can read and display the chats perfectly.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor

5

Hey, thanks for the detailed report. Good news first: your chats are still there, and the Agents window confirms it. I’ll explain why the chat sidebar is empty and share two ways to restore it.

The IDE chat sidebar links history to a specific project folder using an internal ID. On Windows, that ID is calculated from the folder path and its creation time. The Agents window works differently. It scans the whole storage without relying on that ID, so it can still see everything. When you copy folders to a new machine, Windows gives them a new creation time, even if the path and username are identical. Cursor then calculates a new empty ID for the project, so the sidebar looks blank. This is not data loss and not something you misconfigured.

Before trying either option, back up %APPDATA%\Cursor\User\workspaceStorage\.

Option 1: restore the folders’ creation time (no DB edits, reversible)

  1. On the old laptop, for each project folder, get the original value in PowerShell:
    (Get-Item 'C:\path\to\project').CreationTimeUtc.ToString('o')
  2. On the new PC, set the same value for the same folder:
    (Get-Item 'C:\path\to\project').CreationTimeUtc = [DateTime]'VALUE_FROM_STEP_1'
  3. Reopen the project. The ID will be recalculated to the old one and the history should show up. Repeat for each project folder since they’ll have different values.

Option 2: relink workspace storage directly

  1. Open the project in Cursor on the new PC once, so it creates a new workspace folder.
  2. In %APPDATA%\Cursor\User\workspaceStorage\, find the old folder for that project. It will usually have a much larger state.vscdb with your history. You can confirm it’s the right project by checking workspace.json inside.
  3. Copy the contents of the old folder into the new one created in step 1, replacing files.
  4. Fully quit Cursor, then reopen it. The sidebar should load the history.

Both options work, so pick what’s easier. The one thing I’d avoid is manually editing or merging the global state.vscdb, it’s risky. In this thread Bug Report: The REASON why Cursor keeps losing our chats and agents - and how to fix it! there are also community scripts to automate it, but they do edit the database, so use them only at your own risk and only after a backup.

Let me know how it goes.

6

Hey Cursor team, I found a workaround for an issue where my old chats were visible in the Agents Window but not in the IDE chat history.

It looks like Cursor had created two workspace IDs for the same folder.

I fixed it by:

  1. Closing Cursor completely:
Stop-Process -Name Cursor -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
  1. Finding the workspace IDs:
Get-ChildItem "$env:APPDATA\Cursor\User\workspaceStorage" -Directory |
Select-Object Name

  1. After identifying the old and new workspace folders, I backed up the new one.

  2. Then I copied the old workspace state into the new workspace folder:

Copy-Item "$env:APPDATA\Cursor\User\workspaceStorage\<OLD_ID>\*" `
"$env:APPDATA\Cursor\User\workspaceStorage\<NEW_ID>\" `
-Recurse -Force
  1. I reopened Cursor, and the missing chat immediately appeared in the IDE.

So it seems the chat wasn’t lost — Cursor was just using a different workspace storage ID.

Hopefully this helps you reproduce and fix the issue properly. :+1:

8

Hey, thanks for the detailed workaround, and I’m glad it worked.

You got it right, the chats didn’t disappear. The issue is that the same folder ends up with different workspace IDs. On Windows, that ID is calculated from the folder path and its creation time, so after moving to a new PC the folder gets a new creation time and Cursor creates a new empty workspace, while the old history stays in a separate workspaceStorage folder. The Agents window scans all folders without relying on that ID, so everything still shows up there.

Your approach of copying the contents of the old workspace directory into the new one works, and restoring the original folder CreationTime via PowerShell also works. The only thing to keep in mind is to back up %APPDATA%\Cursor\User\workspaceStorage\ before doing anything like this, which you did.

If another user runs into the same thing after a migration, your steps are a solid temporary fix. Thanks for writing it up.