Right now, I have the Windows UX for Cursor running. It connects to my Ubuntu VM where my Node is running. Been working feverishly on the application, when the Cursor app crashed mid-prompt. Usually when I load it back up (windows app), log into Ubuntu via ssh, I can just re-run the prompt… Well this time it wiped out everything. My .env file. All my HTML files. My server.js file which was the heart of my programming project.
It left the database…
My last backup was 24 hours ago, and I restored it, recreated my .env file and got it back working, but I lost everything I did yesterday.
Is there a way to “replay” all those prompts from yesterday to get me where I was before this soiled the bed?
Sorry for the rough experience. The good news is that there are a few things you can try that often help recover most (or even all) of the work:
Checkpoints: Cursor automatically saves checkpoints before the agent makes changes. In your Agent chat, you can just scroll back through the conversation. You should see “Checkpoint created” messages with a Restore link next to them. Clicking Restore will revert all files to that point. You’ll get a confirmation dialog before anything changes, and it’s reversible.
Chat history: Your previous prompts should still be visible in your chat history. You can scroll back and re-run them if checkpoint restore isn’t available.
Git recovery: If your project was in a git repo, try running git reflog or git fsck --lost-found in your Ubuntu VM, git sometimes retains changes even if they weren’t committed.
What likely happened is that the agent was in the middle of an edit when the crash occurred, leaving files in an incomplete state. In the future, I’d recommend committing to git periodically during long agent sessions so you always have a clean recovery point.