Title: Remove 20-conversation limit OR provide conversation export/recovery API
Mr. Radel
Details:
The current 20-conversation limit in Cascade causes permanent data loss. Conversations that drop off the sidebar cannot be recovered — the .pb files on disk are encrypted with per-UUID keys and there's no CLI, API, or UI to access them.
Cascade itself encourages users to "save work for later" without warning that the conversation will become inaccessible. This has cost me hours of critical development work.
Proposed solutions (any one would fix this):
Remove or significantly raise the 20-conversation limit
Provide a CLI/API to list and export ALL conversations by UUID
Add a "Download All Trajectories" bulk export option
Warn users when a conversation is about to be archived/encrypted
Related: GitHub issue #127, #136
Mr. Radel
Pro user lost ~55 conversations (300+ hours of work) to silent auto-deletion and encrypted .pb files — Windsurf needs conversation export/backup
Windsurf Pro subscriber since Jan 21, 2026. In two weeks of intensive daily use, I generated ~60 conversations — hundreds of hours of architecture decisions, debugging, code reviews, and design docs. Then I discovered most were gone.
What Happened
Windsurf silently deletes conversations after ~20 sessions (GitHub Issue #136). No warning, no export option. Only 5 of ~60 survived in ~/.codeium/windsurf/implicit/. The .pb files are encrypted per-UUID (AES-level entropy). Support confirmed they can't recover them.
What I Tried (All Failed)
File-swap (implicit → cascade): Per-UUID encryption blocks it
Protobuf decoding: Not standard protobuf — encrypted binary
Windows Shadow Copies: Too recent to help
state.vscdb analysis: Empty conversation registry
trajectory_search API: Only works on active conversations
What Actually Works (Prevention Only)
"Download Trajectory" (three-dots menu) exports the full active conversation as markdown — but you must do this BEFORE closing a thread. It doesn't preserve screenshots, and doesn't work on archived conversations.
Feature Requests
Warn before auto-deleting conversations (or remove the 20-session limit)
Auto-backup conversations to markdown on close
Allow export of archived conversations from implicit/
Unencrypted local storage option — these are MY files on MY machine
Preserve screenshots in exports
The Bigger Picture
These are local files on the user's own machine, but the user has no way to access their own data. Pro users are paying for a tool that silently destroys their work product. I love Windsurf as a dev tool — the AI is excellent. But conversation management is a serious gap.
Has anyone else hit this? Would you use an auto-backup feature? Happy to share full technical details of everything I tried.
Yeyay
go and post it on reddit too, because they read it more often there + community can back You up, noone sees it here