Lost brush folders

Last response to this post was Nov of last year and I just had this problem!  Is there no way to get back all our hard work? We shouldn't need to have multiple files with the same info in it!  SOOOOO disappointed!

Hello, may be I have found a possible cause for the problem and an easy to handle workaround:

The same problem happend to me. I organized all my brushes in folders and subfolders, closed PS (no crash, no unexpected shutdown etc.) started PS again, and all my folders were gone. In a second step I created just two folders, at this time everything worked fine. Creating step by step additional folders worked correctly until I reached a given number of folders. Therafter all the folders that were created before had gone again.

In a second step I tried what was proposed by M. Shaw. I created a new folder named it "My personal Brush folder", created subfolders and put some brushes into them. I exported this folder to my hard disk, and to my surprise PS saved it as an .abr file, what I could name "My personal Brush folder" to be consistent with the name in the PS brush library.

I shut down PS, restarted it and imported the .abr file that I created before. To my surprise not only the brushes, but also the complete folder structure was loaded, exactly as it had been before in PS (okay there was an additional folder created in terms that I got "My personal Brush folder-->My personal Brush folder--> subfolders".

In a third step I set up my complete Bush Library with all folders and subfolders, but when I tried to export it I got the PS Message that the brushes cannot be exported due to the 2 GB file limitations of Windows (I´m still on Windows 7) and I guess that is the cause for the problem because it matches exactly what I experienced in the second step described above.

In a fourth step I splitted my Library in parts that did exportable i. e. Part 1, Part 2 etc., exported them, shut down PS, started PS, and imported the Parts that I had exported before. All of them loaded correctly, and with (in my case) 5 imports I got my complete brush library. So, for me this is the workaround I mentioned on top. One can organize the brushes as intended, export them, and load them with a few clicks. When PS has found a solution for the problem related to the 2GB file size it is easy to reorganize the part folders to a single folder so the work done up until now is not lost.

Hope this helps

Regards RK

Brush organization and presets do not get written to disk until Photoshop quits. If you add new presets or organize into folders and Photoshop is not quit properly (crashes or is force quit) then we do not get the chance to write them out. I would try again, then quit to make sure they get written out to disk.

[moved from Adobe Creative Cloud to Photoshop General Discussion]