All my projects and conversations are missing after Computer restart

[novaflash82]

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

26.422.30944

What subscription do you have?

Pro

What platform is your computer?

Windows 11 Home

What issue are you seeing?

My Computer had to restart and when it loaded back up I started Codex back up and when I did all of my projects and chats in codex are gone. If I search for them, they do show up, but I can't see them on the main interface. New chats won't appear either.

So no matter what I do I can't see new chats or projects or conversations.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Uploaded thread: 56c49608-2ed1-4765-8258-91fc3ac3ae97

No clue. My computer shut down and when it came back on all my projects and conversations in Codex were missing. I've tried rebooting and nothing.

What is the expected behavior?

Normally all of my chats and projects are in Codex. New chats show up too. Nothing does now.

Additional information

No response

[github-actions]

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

• Windows Desktop: Sidebar shows No chats and no projects after update, but Search can still find/open existing chats #19290
• Codex Windows app and VS Code extension memory usage climbs above 10GB after update #19381
• Windows Desktop: API-login threads disappear from sidebar after restart, but still exist locally #19345

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[novaflash82]

I was able to recover from this locally and wanted to add the concrete workaround/root cause I found.

BTW, Codex with 5.5 on extra high FIXED THIS PROBLEM. So it literally fixed itself lol

This did not appear to be data loss. The threads still existed in the local Codex database (%USERPROFILE%\.codex\state_5.sqlite) and session files. The missing sidebar/projects were caused by the desktop app's global UI/project state being rewritten without saved workspace roots.

On the affected Windows machine, %USERPROFILE%\.codex\.codex-global-state.json had been reduced to only the current projectless thread state, for example it was missing keys like:

• electron-saved-workspace-roots
• active-workspace-roots
• most entries under thread-workspace-root-hints

Older temp global-state files under %USERPROFILE%\.codex\ still contained the prior workspace root, and state_5.sqlite still contained the older thread rows. Restoring those keys brought the sidebar/projects back.

Important detail: editing .codex-global-state.json while Codex Desktop was still running did not stick. The running app had the empty sidebar/project state in memory and overwrote the restored file again on shutdown/relaunch.

The recovery that worked was:

1. Back up %USERPROFILE%\.codex\.codex-global-state.json and %USERPROFILE%\.codex\state_5.sqlite.
2. Fully quit Codex Desktop, including all background Codex.exe / codex.exe processes. Closing the window was not enough in this case.
3. While Codex was fully stopped, restore the missing global state keys:
   • electron-saved-workspace-roots: array of the local workspace root(s)
   • active-workspace-roots: same workspace root(s)
   • thread-workspace-root-hints: map existing thread IDs from state_5.sqlite back to their workspace roots
4. Relaunch Codex Desktop.

After doing the restore post-exit, the projects and conversations reappeared in the left sidebar.

Suggested product-side fixes:

• Treat missing/empty electron-saved-workspace-roots / active-workspace-roots as recoverable if state_5.sqlite still has local threads with cwd values.
• On startup, rebuild workspace roots and thread-workspace-root-hints from the local thread DB/session index when the global state file is missing, truncated, or inconsistent.
• Avoid overwriting a repaired .codex-global-state.json from stale in-memory empty state during shutdown.
• Consider preserving the last known good global-state file before writing a reset/empty one.

This looks like a sidebar/project index corruption issue, not deletion of conversations.