Loading Chat - how can we backup and restore our agent contexts?

Support Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Once again, Cursor has lost all my past chats. This is literally thousands of hours of work - I curate each chat (aka agent), and they’re a team of niche-experts in each facet of my code-base. Losing a chat is like killing all my employees!!!

Steps to Reproduce

Use cursor on windows heavily for a month or two - all your chats will get lost at some point.

Expected Behavior

  1. Never lost.
  2. some way to backup and restore them, to guarantee #1

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

pic_2026-01-07_22.04.38_2556.png
pic_2026-01-07_22.04.38_2556.png946×974 17.3 KB

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.3.21 (system setup)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 68e0a0385b87408d050869ea543e3778ad53f780
Date: 2026-01-02T23:46:13.381Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.17763

Additional Information

please refer this to engineering. This seems to be a critical internal bug (endless loop problem) - as you can see - nothing even shows in devtools (I cleared it, then tried to open a past chat, and waited 30mins)
NOTE: while this IS a bug - it would be better to concentrate on giving us a chat-export and chat-import pair of options, because even when/if you fix the bug, we’re still going to need those anyway.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

2

Hey, thanks for the report. I get how critical it is to lose your chat history.

This is a known issue on Windows, most often caused by database file corruption. The good news is your data is probably not deleted, Cursor likely moved it into a backup file.

Try this workaround: Tutorial: How to Fix "Loading Chat" and Recover History (Cursor v2.3.x)

Main idea: rename state.vscdb.corrupted.* back to state.vscdb in %APPDATA%\Cursor\User\globalStorage.

Also check:

  • Free disk space, low space is a common cause of corruption during updates
  • Any files with .corrupted in the name in that folder

About backup/export: it’s on the roadmap.

Let me know if the workaround brought your chats back. If not, please share details like whether you see any corrupted files and how much free disk space you have.

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