My custom Photoshop Action sets dissapeared yesterday

I've been creating and using custom actions for years, which I use to speed up my client work. 

They save me significant time, and have been solid over the past decade. Yesterday I found that I had to reinstall photoshop. When I launched it, all of my actions were gone. These were actions I imported at some point, from older .atn files, but those .atn files were long gone. All of the Adobe documentation tells you how to back up your .atn files before reinstalling photoshop, and how to import those, which is the same as it's been. but if you do not have access to those original .atn files, there is no documentation about how to recover the actions. 

But you can. And I did. Here's what I did.

(I'm using a mac)

On your drive, in Users/username/library/Preferences there are folders for all of the versions of photoshop you've had installed on that machine. 

Adobe Photoshop 2021 Settings

Adobe Photoshop 2022 Settings

Adobe Photoshop 2023 Settings

Adobe Photoshop 2024 Settings

Adobe Photoshop 2025 Settings

The first thing I did was to backup my 2025 Actions Pallet.psp file. 

These files contain almost no human readable text, but from searching inside these folders, I found that my 2024 settings contained an Actions Palette.psp file that contained a text reference to one of my actions, so I used that settings file to replace the same file in the 2025 settings folder.

I relaunched photoshop and my old actions were in the actions pane. WHEW!

I exported them as .atn files and created a backup to avoid this issue in the future. 

Then I copied my 2025 Actions Pallet.psp back into place, and relaunched Photoshop. 

Again, my actions were missing. But now I could import the .atn files from my new backup files. 

Relaunched again and everything is as it should be. 

I hope this helps someone who's stuck in the same boat as I was. I am really relieved to have my actions back. I wish I had been able to find documentation similar to this process, or that the chat expert I chatted with had any idea at all what to do. I was in a real panic for a bit.