My presets are gone

All computer files are, essentially, vulnerable, and there is no ultimate way to prevent damage to them. If you are concerned about the contents of any file, you should back it up - twice. This is normal practice, and certainly what I do with recorded audio. The Audition Preferences folder is, by default, hidden (so that you don't 'accidentally' delete it), and that is almost certainly why you can't find it. As I described previously, you cannot do a simple 'upload' to replace preferences; you have to go about this in more or less a surgical way if you are going to succeed.

This may all seem a bit harsh, but it is the reality of living in a digital age, where things are not tangible. One of the safer things you can do is to store the files you are most concerned about on some form of physical media. But even if you do that, you have to rely upon the continued existence of the machinery that will let you access it. There are several tape-based file storgage systems that it is now hard to find players for, and ultimately this is going to happen to all formats; nothing is absolutely safe. And unfortunately this is how you have to think, when it comes to backing up even for relatively trivial files. If you are doing this seriously, for a living, then you need to have both an understanding of storage and backup issues, and a long-term strategy for dealing with them.