Lost your chat history after upgrading to LocalAI 4.12.x? Here's a fix.

[Pinucci0]

After upgrading LocalAI to 4.12.x, my chat history disappeared from the web UI. It turns out the chats were never actually lost: they're stored in the browser's localStorage, and after the update a second key appeared — localai_chats_data: — alongside the original localai_chats_data. The new UI reads/writes the suffixed key, while all my old conversations remained in the original one.

Here's a small script that merges both keys (deduplicating by chat id) instead of overwriting either one. Run it in the browser console (F12 → Console) on the LocalAI page, then reload with F5:

{  
  // 1. Find all localStorage keys that hold LocalAI chat data  
  //    (plain "localai_chats_data" plus any "localai_chats_data:<suffix>" variant)  
  const keys = Object.keys(localStorage).filter(k => k.startsWith('localai_chats_data'));  
  console.log('Keys found:', keys);  
  
  // 2. Identify the suffixed key (the one the current UI is actively using)  
  const suffixedKey = keys.find(k => k !== 'localai_chats_data');  
  const rawA = localStorage.getItem('localai_chats_data');  
  const rawB = localStorage.getItem(suffixedKey);  
  
  // Safety backup: copy these outputs to a text file BEFORE the write below!  
  console.log('BACKUP A:', rawA);  
  console.log('BACKUP B:', rawB);  
  
  // 3. Parse both payloads and merge the chats, deduplicating by chat id  
  const a = JSON.parse(rawA);  
  const b = JSON.parse(rawB);  
  const byId = new Map();  
  [...(a?.chats || []), ...(b?.chats || [])].forEach(c => byId.set(c.id, c));  
  
  const merged = {  
    chats: [...byId.values()],  
    // Keep the activeChatId of the most recent key if it still exists  
    activeChatId: byId.has(b?.activeChatId) ? b.activeChatId  
                : (byId.has(a?.activeChatId) ? a.activeChatId : null),  
    lastSaved: Date.now()  
  };  
  
  // 4. Write the merged payload into the active (suffixed) key  
  localStorage.setItem(suffixedKey, JSON.stringify(merged));  
  console.log('Merge complete:', merged.chats.length, 'total chats');  
}

Notes: the script prints both payloads as BACKUP A/BACKUP B to the console — save them to a file before reloading for rollback. The old key is left untouched. Since chat history lives in localStorage, it's also bound to the exact origin: localhost:8080 and 127.0.0.1:8080 are different origins, so check that you're accessing LocalAI from the same URL you used before the upgrade.