Noob help question here—Lost Files!

Discussion
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Help would be greatly appreciated! - Thank you in advance!

I’ve been working hard on building a web app in Cursor over the last few days. I’ve been saving my workspaces, but I’ve only been saving the workspace file itself (which is just 1 KB). I haven’t been manually saving each file inside the workspace individually—I assumed that saving the file I was working on and then saving the entire workspace would be enough.

Additionally, I’ve been pushing my work to GitHub, but I’ve been saving different features (which span multiple files in the app) as separate branches. I wasn’t sure of a better way to structure it, so that’s how I did it.

Now, here’s where the problem starts:

I had my project in a great place, near complete, but then things started failing. I tried restoring to a previous checkpoint in Cursor, but after doing so, I got a bunch of errors and figured I was now stuck in the contiuues error loop with Cursor’s composer. So, I attempted to merge my GitHub branches, restarted Cursor multiple times, and went back and forth trying to fix things. Unfortunately, I now seem to have lost all my files in Cursor. When I run my server, only a fraction of my work from the last few days appears.

I believe my most recent GitHub branch should still have the most up-to-date work as I commited a new branch right before the errors started from the nextp rompt, but I’m worried that it might not contain all the other components of my program.

I’m a complete rookie when it comes to this, so I need someone to explain it to me in very simple terms:

  • When I create new branches in my project and commit them to GitHub, does each branch contain the entire project at that point, or just the specific changes I made?
  • How can I restore everything—all features up until my last commit—so that I get back to where I was before things went wrong? When I got through the Composer logs to points in time where my app had all the correct files and click restore, it does not seem to bring back a bulk of the files.

Any guidance would be hugely appreciated!