Help needed asap! - Cursor deleted my whole proejct

Bug Reports
1

Of course, cursor agent went off the hinges and started deleting my entire app.. I quickly clicked stop as fast as I could and then it shutdown.

I opened up cursor and my entire chat history and restore checkpoints were gone and 90% of my app is gone… I handnt gotten a chacne to push to github yet…

I need this recovered asap. HELP!
Jn

2

recover via timeline in cursor, it is same as in vscode, google what to do

2 Likes
3

Oh this is sweet. Didnt know about timeline :slight_smile: (using Git and ‘History’ mostly), plus backups.

@Jonneal3 if liquefy answered your question please mark it as the solution :slight_smile:

Hope that helped

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No this didn’t work. Timeline is empty on my project. Still not resolved

5

It just did the same thing to me. Timeline is probably empty because the .git and probably its supporting folders were deleted to. I’m working to see if I can save my changes from my last check-in right now. I will report back. You unfortunately are not alone.

My post Files suddenly erased using 0.50.0 on Ubuntu

1 Like
6

Haha thanks @davidktx - I cannot believe cursor would be so blind as to not have a “restore to recent” checkpoint feature liek this when you boot back up from a “stop” event or “quit” or something like this

7

I did do a check-in just a short time back. So I am going to re-clone and see if I can recreate where I had gotten to real quick. I hope someone is listening and looking at what in the code could have caused this, before a lot more people join us.

What OS are you using. What LLM did you have selected? Specific or Auto?

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Thank you all for sharing details, possible solutions and trying things.

Could you please issue check following possibility and if this is not the case describe what exactly happened and how, so the Cursor team can analyze and reproduce.

For this to happen through AI action a few conditions have to occur:

  • Auto-run mode (Yolo) enabled in Cursor → Features, otherwise it cant automatically execute deletions
  • Delete file protection disabled, otherwise it should not be able to delete files
  • Prompt where AI thinks in response that it has to delete something, otherwise it wouldnt be able to act.

Other causes are not excluded, but this would need more information in the bug report. If you report the bug details, or can reproduce the issue please provide a Request ID (for this the privacy mode has to be temporarily set to disabled so the request is logged, you can renable privacy right after)

Its always recommended to:

  • Commit frequently to Git (you can ask AI to do this by itself as well),
  • Use your OS backup capability or preferred backup tool and backup to storage thats not always connected, or at least to remote server/backup provider.
  • Keep the delete file protection ON in Cursor Features settings.
  • Otherwise if you must disable delete file protection, work on specific tasks in separate Git checkout (like a separate project)
  • Always have the Outside workspace protection turned ON.
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Anyone doing any serious coding must use github.

1 Like
10

Agreed. Ive been a developer for 6 years. This is a new project I was screwin’ around with a few days, though i did get a lot done. All those days work gone.

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Got it thanks. Well this is the problem. I want it to delete files. Why? Because a ton of the time it duplicates files.

Lets get to the real issue. Cursor MUST save checkpoints and immediately make them accessable for days after even on the pro plan please. That is an absolute must. Any decent software should be able to do this in 2 seconds even on a crash. When it crashed/shut down it didn’t save the chat history and thus no checkpoints.

I’m a developer so I already know longer term solutions. I’d like to focus on the resolution to this case in particular here.

12

Sorry to hear about this. So, I’m guessing you did not git commit during your code changes…been there, done that! Agreed, checkpoints should be respected for crashes etc otherwise, well, it’s not a checkpoint.

1 Like
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Yeah I was kindof working my way into a project. Been working on it about a week. But it became clearer this past weekend that maybe I should take it a bit more seriously and hence was going to set up Git last night was my plan. then it deleted my project. Yeah 100% on the checkpoints - They should just have a basics file structure file saved to their database (of my project) and pushed to sentry for crashes. Its not a difficult technical problem for this use case. The checkpoints now are just “diffs”.

14

Yes that would be a great feature request :slight_smile: agreed!

Valid points, Cursor would have to think how to integrate that as most of data would have to stay local as many users require privacy settings to not store code outside the system.

If you use MacOS you have automatically the option to use TimeMachine (similar solutions exist on Windows and Linux) which takes backups every hour, so even if AI deletes the folder you can go back and restore it.

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/var/logs on Ubuntu and other Unix derivatives

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Can you add a feature to dump (and import) your settings to JSON file.

Mine was Auto Run Off, Delete File Off, any Others?

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Im not sure how that would work as I am not a developer at Anysphere.

18

Never happened to me (as use it more for Ask Questions rather than vibecode tasks).

Workaround for those concerned:

I have my whole project folder mapped to a cloud drive, and my cloud drive has a Revision History/Rewind feature for stuff I didn’t push to github yet. It’s a backup to my backup, essentially.

It has saved my ■■■ when I accidentally mess up a git command, or (non-repo folders) accidentally move/delete a file.

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