Whenever I have multiple folders/repos open in the workspace, closing Cursor results in AI chat sessions being completely lost, even if I save the workspace and reload it. I’ve lost literally weeks worth of AI chat sessions because of this. It’s to the point I dread updating to newer versions because I know important chats will be forgotten by Cursor.
Steps to Reproduce
Open multiple repos in the same Cursor workspace. Start some chat sessions. Close Cursor. Save the workspace to a file on the desktop. Close Cursor and make sure the process is gone. Then restart it, and reopen the workspace you’ve saved. AI chat window won’t show a history.
Hey, this is a known pain point with multi-root workspaces specifically.
Chat history in Cursor is stored per workspace in SQLite files (state.vscdb), and multi-root workspaces (multiple folders open together) can be tricky. The workspace ID can change depending on how you open the folders, so your history can “disappear” even though the data is still on disk.
A couple of questions to narrow it down:
When you reopen the workspace, are you opening it from the saved .code-workspace file every time, or are you adding folders manually via File > Add Folder to Workspace?
Can you check if transcript files exist at ~/.cursor/projects/ (look for agent-transcripts folders)? If they’re there, the conversation data isn’t actually lost. It’s just that the sidebar list lost its link to them.
In the meantime, as a workaround, always open your workspace from the same .code-workspace file. This should keep the workspace ID consistent and preserve your chat history between sessions.
The team is aware of persistence issues with multi-root workspaces. Let me know what you find with the above.
I found my lost transcripts inside the Users-myusername-Library-Application-Support-Cursor-Workspaces-1769889084291-workspace-json folder. However, two issues:
There is no workspace file at that location. ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/Workspaces is actually completely empty.
The transcripts in the Users-myusername-Library-Application-Support-Cursor-Workspaces-1769889084291-workspace-json folder are .txt files, whereas in the other folders they are .jsonl files. This might be unrelated to the issue.
When quitting Cursor it prompts me if I want to save my workspace settings, and I always save them to a folder on my Desktop. I always open that workspace file directly, so the workaround you provided is already what I do, and it does not work. For example, the workspace file I saved yesterday when updating Cursor, which is named myapp.code-workspace, has no chat history:
@deanrie I’m also experiencing the same problem. I see several subdirectories in ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/Users/workspaceStorage, but I’m not sure how to find the actual chat.
This keeps happening. I lost another week’s worth of AI chat sessions. I’m about to give up on Cursor and will also tell our director of engineering to cancel our subscription.
