Lost Composer/Chat History after closing and re-opening workspace

Bug Reports
1

Thanks for reporting a bug you have found in Cursor!
Please add the following info to help us diagnose your issue:

:white_check_mark: Check the forum Issue reported here, but the bug report is very vague: composer history gone after closing cursor · Issue #2004 · getcursor/cursor · GitHub

:lady_beetle: Provide a clear description of the bug

After an update, Cursor lost chat and composer history for my project.

:counterclockwise_arrows_button: Explain how to reproduce the bug (if known)

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Open a folder
  2. Add another folder to the workspace
  3. Chat/use composer
  4. Close cursor (in my case, for an update – not sure if this is relevant)
  5. Cursor offers the option to save your workspace as a file; choose yes
  6. After Cursor restart, open workspace file
  7. Chat/composer history is missing

:camera: Attach screenshots or recordings (e.g., .jpg, .png, .mp4).

N/A

:laptop: Tell us your operating system and your Cursor version (e.g., Windows, 0.x.x).

MacOS 15.1.1
Cursor version 0.45.4 (after update, unsure of pre-update version)

:prohibited: Tell us if the issue stops you from using Cursor.

No, but I was working through a large problem, and the context was quite important to me. It does set back my work on this issue considerably.

I’d love any feedback about how the history might be recovered. (Are there debug commands, for example?)

2

Hey, it seems you moved the file from where you saved it. You need to return it to its original location, and then your history should be intact.

3

Thanks for your reply! I didn’t have a workspace file until I closed Cursor and it offered to create one. (I had just added a folder to the workspace) I haven’t moved the one that it created.

4

Anyway, you can open your project, and the chats should have your previous conversations.

5

They aren’t. That’s the bug I’m reporting. I have opened it three ways in an attempt to recover the chats:

  1. Open the newly-created workspace file (no history)
  2. Open the frontend project (old history)
    2a. Add the backend project to #2 (same as #2)
  3. Open the backend project (different old history)

I should note that when I say project, I’m really referring to “open folder”

6

Let me check that, and I’ll get back to you with an answer.

7

I tried to replicate your case, and my history in the workspace was preserved. Could you also let me know which version you updated from? In your case, the problem might have been caused by an update to Cursor, leading to an internal error. Since, as you mentioned earlier, you didn’t move the file, that’s likely not the reason for the missing history.

I see that you’ve tried several ways to open projects, but the history is still missing. If you can reproduce the problem again and confirm that it persists, let me know, and I will report it to our team.

I also recommend installing this extension, which automatically saves the history of your chats in your project to prevent the same issue from occurring in the future.

1 Like
8

I am having the same issue. Each time I update cursor my entire composer history is erased. I just updated to the latest versions.

9

Screenshot 2025-01-30 at 4.50.21 PM
Screenshot 2025-01-30 at 4.50.21 PM782×1312 113 KB

![Screenshot 2025-01-30 at 4.50.38 PM|586x500]
(upload://31K38spph5mnigmzcL8EcFzB4XG.png)

10

Hey, what platform are you on?

11

Hey, same problem here
MacOs 15.3
I just updated the Cursor, and after several days of communication, chat went to an unknown place.
I updated the version a couple of hours ago. This is really a disappointment since I literally lost several days of work.

12

Just to note - the composer/chat history isn’t meant to be permanent storage. For important conversations you should save them into markdown files in your project that you can reference with @

That said, this is usually caused by low disk space during updates. To prevent this happening again:

  1. Make sure you have enough free space before updating
  2. Save important chats to markdown files
  3. Clean up unnecessary files regularly

You can check out more about this in our docs here: Cursor – Common Issues

1 Like
13

The issue has nothing to do with disk space-- I have 32GB free on my disk and still lost all but the most recent composer/chat history after multiple upgrades.

Can you please just make a setting that lets me retain X days/GB worth of history?

Or is this a backward compatibility problem?

14

More than that, isn’t this stuff stored somewhere? Can we maybe get a view on ALL of our history so that Cursor doesn’t have to decide what is relevant? Perhaps an option to automatically save them? When I update Cursor, I’m not expecting to lose state. The current conversation is important, because I’m generally in the middle of something.

15

Same issue.

This is very interruptive, as I just reopened the Cursor due to some bug (certain workspace not being rendering to screen), and the entire history is gone, right in the middle of working on a feature that had a ton of context.

Just to note - the composer/chat history isn’t meant to be permanent storage

There’s no warning or info that chat history is bound to disappear.

After being intact for months, it’s suddenly removed for every one of my projects.

This IMO is very problematic.

There should be a setting that either allows keeping history, or a huge red warning.

16

Experienced the same issue on Macbook pro M3 v15.1.1. Really stinks to lose composer/chat sessions from multiple weeks of iterative development.

17

@danperks your information/feedback is incomplete. As I said in another similar thread, using the extension CursorChat I’m able to access all the history of my conversations (and I can see the databases are all on the disk).

But Cursor itself is unable to do so, it means the bug is in Cursor or some sort of index it looses.

Can you please suggest how to fix or rebuild it or make Cursor aware of the fact the files are all there and intact?

18

This is quite shocking.

Cursor doesn’t save a permanent record of all chats somewhere? I just upgraded from Free Trial to Pro and cannot find a record of the hours of chat and context that has been built up.

2 Likes
19

In an IDE that has CHATTING WITH AI its central feature, I don’t understand how they can say “sorry guys the chats are not important so you might loose them and there’s no safe way for us to manage them so if your space runs low on hard drive you MIGHT LOOSE THEM ALL”.

Any proper dev of the product able to understand why this is a crucial fault?

1 Like
20

Used Cursor to help itself.

Here is a chat history exporter in .md format:

With that, can feed the .md output back into a new chat at least, as context.