As a result of a safe prompt that did not foreshadow trouble Cursor deleted ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING from my SSD drive where the project he was working on was stored. What should I do? I’m panicking and frustrated. Thousands files of data and documents and projects are lost. It’s good that at least the browser was on another drive and I can write this.
Here’s what most likely happened: you were on version 2.4.35 (Feb 10), and that release had a critical encoding bug in terminal scripts. The Russian Windows locale uses code page 1251 (not UTF-8), and that’s one of the triggers for this bug. When running commands through PowerShell, paths could get mangled, and a delete could hit the whole drive instead of a specific folder. This was fixed in later versions.
Also, the File-Deletion Protection and External-File Protection settings only protect against deletions done through Cursor’s built-in tools (the editor and file manager). Terminal commands like rmdir /s /q or Remove-Item -Recurse -Force run directly in the shell and bypass those protections. The team is aware, and we’ve seen a few similar reports:
File recovery: run Recuva or R-Studio as soon as possible. Most important, don’t write anything new to that SSD, so you don’t overwrite deleted data. The sooner you start, the better your chances.
Update Cursor to the latest version. This should close the encoding bug.
Cursor Settings > Agents > turn off “Auto-run mode”. The agent will ask for confirmation before each terminal command, and you can reject destructive commands before they run.
A few questions for incident tracking:
Was Auto-run mode enabled?
Can you share the Request ID from that chat? (Top right of the chat → Copy Request ID)
Auto-run mode was enabled. Even if I left confirmation from user who would watch a thousand times during development what the agent does with the files? No one expects that at any moment all your files on the disk will disappear!
