Urgent: Recover Lost Chats & Data After Cursor Crashes - Need File Paths & Backup Guide

Support Help
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Hi everyone,

I’m reaching out because I recently experienced a serious and frustrating issue with Cursor that I believe others might also face. While working, Cursor crashed unexpectedly, and afterward I discovered that weeks of chat history and project-related data had disappeared.

The chat history was critical to my ongoing work, and losing it has delayed my projects significantly. After some investigation, I managed to locate what seems to be the lost data in a .txt file within Cursor’s local project folders, but I don’t know how to properly restore it back into Cursor.

Here’s what happened and what I’ve tried:

  1. Cursor crashed during use, and after restarting, all recent chat transcripts were gone.

  2. Support mentioned that chat data is stored locally, but did not provide clear recovery steps.

  3. I found a file here:
    C:\Users\[USERNAME]\.cursor\projects\...\agent-transcripts\[UUID].txt
    which appears to contain my lost conversations.

What I’m asking for help with:

  • Has anyone successfully restored chat history from local transcript files? If so, could you share the steps?

  • Where exactly does Cursor store project data, settings, and chat backups on Windows/Mac/Linux?

  • What is the recommended way to back up everything—chats, projects, settings—so it can be restored on another machine or after a crash?

  • Is there an import feature or a manual method to load .txt chat transcripts back into Cursor?

I believe this is an important issue that could affect more users, especially those relying on Cursor for development and collaboration. If anyone from the Cursor team is reading this, clear documentation or a built-in recovery feature would be incredibly helpful.

Thanks in advance for any guidance or shared experiences.

3

finding .cursor/projects/…/agent-transcripts/*.txt usually means the content still exists. here’s what i’d try

  1. close Cursor
  2. back up these folders (don’t touch anything until you do this): %APPDATA%\Cursor\User\workspaceStorage and %APPDATA%\Cursor\User\globalStorage
  3. In %APPDATA%\Cursor\User\globalStorage, look for files like state.vscdb.corrupted.<timestamp>
  • if present: rename current state.vscdb and state.vscdb.backup to state.vscdb.old
  • rename the state.vscdb.corrupted.* file back to state.vscdb
  1. relaunch cursor

may not work, but worth a shot