I’d been working on a website for about 9 hours. I wanted to save my work, I hit “Save As” no window popped up… so I hit the “Apply All changes” in the new Focused AI window.
I notice the Local Host website now has pages missing, so I checked the AI chat convo and its missing hours of conversation. I’ve not saved anything, I’ve not closed anything. The chat is there but missing hours.
What can I do to recover this? Where have I gone wrong? Was I not meant to apply all changes I’d made, since it was the best version of what I had?
The time spent wasn’t that long, but it’s still disappointing. I don’t quite understand why you’re doing a manual commit instead of a Git commit, and why you’re exiting when everything should have been saved automatically. However, sometimes these kinds of cursor-related issues can occur, and the file can be completely reset during editing. I think you can’t recover from this because this has happened to me many times.
Are files not automatically saving as the model edits/creates them? I thought that was standard behavior. If not, something may be wrong with your setup.
I don’t know about files that are completely gone, but you can see previous revisions of files via Timeline.
Also as others have suggested, using Git would be super helpful. I use Git minimally. You don’t need to use any of the complicated features to get a nice backup system with Git, even locally, but pushing it to the cloud like a free private repo like GitLab.com is also really easy. It’s worth taking 30 mins to just learn some basics. Then you can develop with peace of mind. Cursor IDE has git integrated, so you can commit/save a backup right from the IDE with ease.
It is also bad practice from my experience to not apply all changes as soon as you can. Once you start editing files, starting new chats, and they are all editing the same files. It can get messy. Best to never have any pending changes on a file before you have a new chat start working on it. Not saying that’s what you did, but it has tripped me up and I have lost a tiny bit of work doing that.
Also in regards to recovering work. If you have any of the webpages still open, you may be able to download the cache, or if the webserver is still serving old files, then you can download them hopefully there. The models may have them in cache too, so you could ask them to recreate some files possibly. Losing work really suc ks, but it really only takes one time like this for you to figure out a backup plan so it never happens again.
Anytime something I am working suddenly starts working right or looking really good, I make a git commit right away. I hate getting something to work, then making a change and not being able to get it back to that working state. With Git, you could easily see what changed or just revert everything back. Not using Git is like developing with a single laptop monitor.
I used to do this too, but to be fair Git is even simpler than putting everything in a .rar file which then has to be labeled and stored (which can get big very quickly depending on the size). Git seems scary at first, but once you learn the basics it will be the first thing you setup when you start a new project. You can get away with using only like 4 commands with Git. Using Git is by far the best advice I ever received, and its free.
I actually first attempted to do the Git option via GitHub MCP. But I couldn’t get it to work, and I was feeling cautious about adding personal tokens to Cursor as I have clients work on my Github.
Maybe you guys could help me clarify some of this is my head:
TimeLine
I had been working most the day, all the changes were appearing on LocalHost perfectly…
But it said I had to “Apply X Changes” (like it used to get you to apply each change as it was made on cursor) – Were the files (to the left, in the folder) updated at this point?
If I don’t “Apply” - can i still update Git?
I think my issue is what is “Saved” vs Applied.
Also, if I do autosave, is it just overwriting my original file? or is it similar to Save Game Autosave with timestamps.
I’m sure Cursor used to have better Rollback save points system.
