After installing Cursor 3 (system install), my Cursor 2.5 (user install) lost its chat/agent history. The chat/agent history is visible in the system install. How can I get it back in the 2.5 version as well?
Steps to Reproduce
Install Cursor 3.0 as a system install over an earlier version as a user install.
What’s happening is that both the user install 2.5 and the system install 3.0 use the same data directory, %APPDATA%\Cursor. When you launched Cursor 3.0, it migrated the internal database format state.vscdb, and after that the older 2.5 binary can’t read the updated data correctly.
That’s why the history shows up in 3.0 but not in 2.5. The data is still there, it’s just no longer compatible with the older version.
Unfortunately, running two major versions in parallel with a shared data directory isn’t a supported setup. You can’t get the history back in 2.5 without rolling back the database format, and that would break 3.0.
Recommendation: fully switch to Cursor 3.0 system install and uninstall 2.5 user install. Your full history is already available in 3.0.
Thanks for clarifying Dean. I wanted to test 3.0 before making the change, but I guess I have to stick with 3.0. Is there a way to roll back the database to the format used in 2.5 if I decide I want to downgrade?
Unfortunately, there’s no official way to roll the database format back to 2.5. The state.vscdb migration that 3.0 does on first launch is a one-way conversion.
The only option is if you had a backup of the %APPDATA%\Cursor folder from before you launched 3.0. Then you could restore the old DB version and keep using 2.5. But if there’s no backup, the data is already in the new format.
In practice, 3.0 is the same Cursor with an updated layout and engine, and all your history and settings should still be there. I’d recommend moving fully to 3.0 since backward compatibility with 2.5 isn’t supported.
