Urgent – Lost All Chat and Agent Mode History

Bug Reports
19

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

After updating Cursor, all conversation history disappeared from the UI, despite the data being intact in the database.

Composer/Chat History UI - macOS (Darwin 25.0.0)

Steps to Reproduce

  • Upgrade Cursor
  • Restart Cursor
  • Observe an empty history in the UI

Expected Behavior

Past conversations should show up in the UI

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.7.44
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: 9d178a4■■■89981b62546448bb32920a8219a5d0
Date: 2025-10-10T15:43:37.500Z
Electron: 34.5.8
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.1
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.0.0

Additional Information

(COMPOSED BY THE AGENT)

Technical Investigation

I performed extensive database analysis and discovered the root cause:

Database Location: ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/User/globalStorage/state.vscdb

The Problem: Storage Format Incompatibility

Old Conversations (Pre-Update):

  • Messages stored in fullConversationHeadersOnly field in the database
  • All 3,236 conversations with 51,497 messages are intact and readable
  • Successfully exported and verified multiple conversations

New Conversations (Post-Update):

  • fullConversationHeadersOnly: Empty array
  • Uses different storage mechanism
  • Works fine in UI

Issue: New Cursor version (1.7.44) doesn’t read the old fullConversationHeadersOnly format, causing all pre-update conversations to be invisible despite data being intact.

Database Evidence

SELECT key, 
  json_extract(value, '$.fullConversationHeadersOnly') as old_data
FROM cursorDiskKV 
WHERE key LIKE 'composerData:%';

Old conversations have extensive data, new version doesn’t read it.

What I Tried (All Failed)

:white_check_mark: Verified UI registries (lastOpenedBcIds, windowBcMapping, panel entries) - all correct
:white_check_mark: Attempted data migration between fields
:white_check_mark: Tried rebuilding conversation arrays
:white_check_mark: Multiple restarts, verified no archived conversations
:cross_mark: Nothing worked - fundamental format incompatibility

Impact

  • Severity: High - complete loss of UI access to history
  • Data Loss: None (data intact, manually extractable)
  • Workaround: Manual database exports only

Suggested Fix

Add backward compatibility layer:

if (data.conversation.length === 0 && 
    data.fullConversationHeadersOnly.length > 0) {
  // Auto-migrate old format on first access
  data.conversation = migrateFromHeaders(data.fullConversationHeadersOnly);
}

Similar Reports

Other users experiencing this after updates:

Available: Detailed database analysis, sample exports, can provide sanitized database samples if needed.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue