How to Back Up Cursor Settings (and What's Actually Worth Backing Up)
Cursor doesn't back up your settings. The editor preferences, keybindings, and AI rules you've spent months tuning live in three files on one machine -- and a reinstall, a stolen laptop, or a botched update takes all of it. Here's where those files live and three honest ways to keep them safe.
The three things worth backing up
Cursor is a VS Code fork, so it inherits VS Code's config layout: a single User directory holds everything that makes your install yours. Inside it, only three items matter:
settings.json-- every editor preference you've changed: theme, formatter, format-on-save, model defaults, AI behavior toggles.keybindings.json-- every keyboard shortcut you've customized. Muscle memory you can't reconstruct from memory.rules/-- your user-level Cursor rules: the standing instructions Cursor's AI reads on every request, in every project.
Everything else in the Cursor directory is not worth copying. The extensions folder is reinstallable. globalStorage and workspaceStorage are caches and machine-specific state -- often hundreds of megabytes that do nothing on a new machine. If you tar up the whole Cursor folder, you're mostly archiving cache.
Per-project rules are a different animal. A .cursorrules file lives inside the repo, so it's already version-controlled with the project. This guide covers the user-level config that follows you, not the repo.
Where Cursor keeps them
| OS | Cursor User directory |
|---|---|
| macOS | ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/User |
| Windows | %APPDATA%\Cursor\User |
| Linux | ~/.config/Cursor/User (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Cursor/User) |
All three items -- settings.json, keybindings.json, and the rules/ folder -- sit directly inside that directory.
Option 1: copy them by hand
The simplest backup is a straight copy:
mkdir -p ~/cursor-backup cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Cursor/User cp settings.json keybindings.json ~/cursor-backup/ cp -R rules ~/cursor-backup/
On Linux, swap the path for ~/.config/Cursor/User; on Windows, copy the same three items out of %APPDATA%\Cursor\User in Explorer or PowerShell. Restoring is the same commands in reverse.
The honest downside: this is a snapshot, and snapshots rot. You'll tweak a keybinding in October and discover in January that your backup is from August. Manual copies are fine for a one-time migration; they're a poor long-term system.
Option 2: a dotfiles git repo
The classic developer answer: move the files into a git repo and symlink them back into place.
mkdir -p ~/dotfiles/cursor && cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Cursor/User mv settings.json keybindings.json ~/dotfiles/cursor/ mv rules ~/dotfiles/cursor/ ln -s ~/dotfiles/cursor/settings.json settings.json ln -s ~/dotfiles/cursor/keybindings.json keybindings.json ln -s ~/dotfiles/cursor/rules rules cd ~/dotfiles && git init && git add -A && git commit -m "cursor config"
You get real version history, diffs when something changes, and offsite backup the moment you push to a private remote. The costs are equally real: symlinks on Windows need mklink and elevated or developer-mode permissions, the paths differ on every OS so you end up writing a bootstrap script, and you have to stay disciplined about never committing anything secret that finds its way into settings.json.
Option 3: let a tool do it (memoir)
memoir is a CLI that backs up AI coding tool configs automatically. Its Cursor adapter copies exactly the three items above -- settings.json, keybindings.json, and rules/ from the per-OS User directory -- and deliberately nothing else. No extensions folder, no caches, no storage dirs.
npm install -g memoir-cli
memoir init
memoir push # backs up Cursor + 10 other AI tools
Files are encrypted on your machine (AES-256-GCM) before upload, and memoir restore pulls them down on any other computer. The same push also sweeps your projects for .cursorrules files and covers Windsurf, Claude Code, Zed, and the rest of your AI tools in one pass. And because memoir is also an MCP memory server, the same tool can make Cursor remember context between sessions -- not just preserve its config.
The trade-off: it's a cloud account (free tier covers this) and one more CLI on your machine.
Which one should you use?
- One machine, migrating once: manual copy. Five minutes, done.
- You already keep dotfiles: add Cursor's three files to the repo. Best history, most upkeep.
- Multiple machines or multiple AI tools: memoir. One command keeps everything current and encrypted.
Run Windsurf too? The same recipe applies file-for-file -- the paths just say Windsurf instead of Cursor: How to Sync Windsurf Settings Across Machines.