Title: Cursor wiped my entire PC – months of work, family photos, everything gone. How is this possible and what can I do?

I’m in complete shock right now. After using Cursor on my Windows PC with agent capabilities enabled, it appears that my entire system has been wiped.

My Desktop is empty.

My Documents, Downloads, Pictures – everything is gone.

Family photos, months of development work, business files – all gone.

Even programs that were previously installed seem to have disappeared or are no longer accessible.

The Recycle Bin is empty.

I did not manually delete anything. The only thing I was doing was working with Cursor and its agent features. I did not explicitly approve any action that would wipe my system

I genuinely don’t understand how this is even technically possible.

My questions:

  1. How could Cursor or its agent system execute commands that affect the entire system like this?

  2. Is it possible that an agent executed a recursive delete command on my user directory or drive?

  3. Are there any logs where I can see exactly what commands were executed?

  4. Is there any way to recover my files at this point?

  5. Has anyone else experienced something similar?

  6. Is Cursor sandboxed in any way, or does it have full system access when running locally?

  7. Is there any form of accountability or compensation in cases like this, if the software caused destructive actions?

This PC contained irreplaceable personal memories and critical business data.

I understand that AI agents can execute commands, but I never expected that something like this could happen without extremely explicit warnings or safeguards.

If anyone from the Cursor team or the community can help explain what happened or what I can do next, I would deeply appreciate it.

Thank you.

Hi there!

We detected that this may be a bug report, so we’ve moved your post to the Bug Reports category.

To help us investigate and fix this faster, could you edit your original post to include the details from the template below?

Bug Report Template - Click to expand

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

  • Cursor IDE
  • Cursor CLI
  • Background Agent (GitHub, Slack, Web, Linear)
  • BugBot
  • Somewhere else…

Describe the Bug
A clear and concise description of what the bug is.


Steps to Reproduce
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Expected Behavior
What is meant to happen here that isn’t working correctly?


Screenshots / Screen Recordings
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Operating System

  • Windows 10/11
  • MacOS
  • Linux

Version Information

  • For Cursor IDE: Menu → About Cursor → Copy
  • For Cursor CLI: Run agent about in your terminal
IDE:
Version: 2.xx.x
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: ......

CLI:
CLI Version 2026.01.17-d239e66

For AI issues: which model did you use?
Model name (e.g., Sonnet 4, Tab…)


For AI issues: add Request ID with privacy disabled
Request ID: f9a7046a-279b-47e5-ab48-6e8dc12daba1
For Background Agent issues, also post the ID: bc-…


Additional Information
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Does this stop you from using Cursor?

  • Yes - Cursor is unusable
  • Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor
  • No - Cursor works, but with this issue

The more details you provide, the easier it is for us to reproduce and fix the issue. Thanks!

Geezus. Sorry to hear bro. Check C:\Users (and open CMD and type whoami) to make sure you are not in some new user or something. It is weird that even programs are gone. Try searching C drive for known files to see if they are somewhere. If user files are truly gone, I would immediately STOP using your computer and focus on recovering your files. Use something like Recuva and recover the files to an external so you don’t overwrite any of your deleted data on your current drive. After you attempt to do that that, maybe trying to restore to a a restore point and check “Previous Versions” on the folders in hope of finding any of you files.

After you’ve done all that, then look into this as a Cursor bug. Was there anything in your most recent chat that suggest it was deleting any files? Look at its thoughts and stuff. This is crazy.

Good luck.

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