Windows 10 upgrade forgot my Lightroom installation

[newmikeman]

My Lightroom 6.4 installation did not survive my upgrade from Windows 7 to 10.

It forgot about my licence and lost all its presets, preferences and settings.

I don't know what else it forgot.

I do have a backup of the disk drives involved but what else should I look for?

thanks

[John T Smith]

You may need to DE-activate, UN-install and then reinstall

[newmikeman]

Thanks, but the result of the Win10 upgrade was just as though I had done that; doing it again would be unlikely to make any difference. My catalog was intact and subsequently I found the preferences folder  but my presets were gone and I'm wondering whether there are other places to look for things like that?

[jbm007]

Check  and see if they are there still.

C:\Documents and Settings\Your name\application Data\Adobe\LigthRoom\Develop Presets

[newmikeman]

Thanks for your helpful responses.

No they were not there. The folder

    C:\Users\mnewm\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Develop Presets

contained 2 empty directories: Lightroom Presets and User Presets.

Under

    C:\Users\mnewm\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom

there are all the usual directories like Export Presets, Filter Presets, Metadata Presets and Locations. and none of them except one has any files in them.

The only one containing any files is Modules and it contains Photomatix.lrplugin and its files.

Yesterday Preferences was also empty but today it contains 2 files time-stamped 03:30 this morning, which is when Microsoft Windows 10 did its periodic update - I don't know why it would want to mess with Lightroom files though.

I changed my Lr preference to store presets with the catalog and to store the catalog and presets in a different folder. Maybe this is risky if Adobe and/or Microsoft insist on assuming that it lives in the AppData\Roaming directory.

For now I think I have rescued myself by using BeyondCompare to identify the files on my last backup (not just Lr backup) and copy them to my current Lr directory.

Really this thread is aimed at Adobe to please explain what they think they are up to and to learn not to mess up people's data just because the OS got upgraded - this OS upgrade made no changes to the file system or its structure and all other applications have behaved perfectly well.

Regards, Mike

[newmikeman · Accepted solution]

This article sheds a good deal of light on this subject, though I still don't understand why all my presets etc disappeared unless Lightroom was mysteriously uninstalled and reinstalled.

http://www.lightroomforums.net/threads/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-store-presets-with-catalog-option....

The article by Jim Wilde explains all about the preset storage options and on this basis I have reverted to have "Store presets with this catalog" Unchecked and I have copied all the contents back to the default location under AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom.

regards, Mike