Cursor's skill sync can overwrite your local skills folder

If you turned on Sync Skills for Cloud Agents in Cursor, our advice is to copy your ~/.cursor/skills folder somewhere safe before you switch it off. Cursor staff member Colin confirmed this morning that switching it off copied an old snapshot over one Mac user's local skills, wiping a day of edits. If that already happened to you, your newer copies are probably in the macOS Trash.

• Status: Open. Colin "confirmed what you described and flagged it to the team." No fix date.
• Affects: Cursor IDE users who turned on Settings, Agents, Context and Tools, Sync Skills for Cloud Agents. The report is on macOS with Cursor 3.24.18.
• Symptom: the first sync hangs at "Syncing 50 of 50," and turning the setting off replaces your local skills with the stored copy.
• Workaround: keep the setting off, and back up the folder before you try it again.

What happened#

On Oct 15 at 6:15 PM ET, nathalie_kroeker reported that she turned the setting on Oct 14, the first sync never finished, and turning it off on Oct 15 made Cursor copy the stale Oct 14 store back over her folder. That "deleted a day of local changes with no warning and no backup," including new scripts, SKILL.md edits and one skill's package.json and node_modules.

At 4:28 AM ET today, Colin explained the design: "Today the setting moves your skills rather than mirroring them." Turning it on copies skills into the synced store and retires the local copies, and "turning it off copies the store’s version back over the local folder." Because her first sync never finished, the local folder "stayed in place and looked live, but it was no longer what got synced." He added: "There is no server-side copy of your Oct 15 changes."

Why it matters#

Our read: most people would read a sync switch as a backup. Today it works more like a move, so edits made after a stalled sync can be lost the moment you turn it off. Teams that keep shared skills in that folder have the most to lose.

What to do now#

1. Back up first. Colin says that if you try the setting again later, back up the folder first, for example cp -R ~/.cursor/skills ~/cursor-skills-backup in Terminal.
2. Leave Sync Skills for Cloud Agents off for now, as Colin advises.
3. If your folder was already overwritten, open the Trash in Finder, switch to List view, turn on the Date Added column and sort by it. Colin says Cursor moved each replaced folder to the Trash "rather than deleting it outright," so the newer copies should be there unless you emptied it.
4. Copy the folders you need back into ~/.cursor/skills.
5. Note that Cancel "stops a run without removing anything," per Colin. Turning the setting off is what overwrote the folder.

Prompt (ours) for a Cursor agent, before you touch the setting:

Copy ~/.cursor/skills to ~/cursor-skills-backup-<today's date>, then list every skill folder in both places and confirm the counts match. Do not delete or move anything.

Good to know#

• Colin suspects skill names that exist in both ~/.cursor/skills and ~/.claude/skills "may be what kept the sync stuck at 50 of 50," and asked the reporter to check with comm -12 <(ls ~/.cursor/skills) <(ls ~/.claude/skills). That is a hunch from staff, not a confirmed cause.
• Another forum user, auscaster, noted that the docs say turning sync off moves skills back, but don't explain how newer local files are reconciled.
• One account so far. The Trash recovery steps are for macOS; staff haven't said where replaced folders go on Windows or Linux.

What to watch#

A fix that stops the overwrite or keeps a backup, any change to the docs wording, and whether the name overlap with ~/.claude/skills turns out to be the cause of the stall.