Custom Actions location?

[clutch-cargo]

Had my motherboard go on the fritz so a new complete install of Win 10 and Illustrator CS6 was in order.  Luckily I saved my entire C: drive so I have an exact copy of the old system and AI.  I also performed a backup of all my custom actions before the motherboard failure.

With that said,  I loaded up a few of the old custom actions but I am seeing a few errors running them now so I want to compare my saved actions against those I had in AI at the time of the crash.

Where are those custom actions stored?  What is the path? I am not talking about my "saved" actions but those I created and reappear each time I open AI.  They've got to be hidden somewhere?

[Kurt Gold]

Are you talking about your custom actions which you didn't save as .aia files?

They used to be stored inside the Illustrator Preferences file (AIPrefs).

[clutch-cargo]

Yes, that is what I am talking about.  I searched all the *.aip in AI and nothing gives a clue as what might contain my custom actions.  Dates for all aip's are 2012.  My actions were created from 2016-2018.  None of my custom action names are listed. 

Mmmmm... wondering if I could copy over all the old .aip's into the new AI install and maybe the custom actions would appear??

[Kurt Gold]

Searching for *.aip files won't help. Action files = *.aia

But even searching for *.aia files will not help in this case since the unsaved action sets are not stored as *.aia files. They are somewhere inside the Illustrator Preferences file (plain text).

You may try this:

- Quit Illustrator

- In your backup do a file system search for Adobe Illustrator Prefs

- Copy that file and paste it into the same location in your new Windows installation (overwriting the original Illustrator Prefs file)

- Restart Illustrator

Normally, you should now see your custom unsaved actions in the Actions palette.

[clutch-cargo]

Ok, did a search on Adobe Illustrator Prefs.... zero hits

So as another test I loaded up a single Action (from one of my old saved actions), on the new install.  I then shut down AI and restarted to ensure it was still there and then performed a search of Adobe Illustrator Prefs on that.  Zero hits!?

Tried also a search on any file *.* created or modified after 8/3/2018.  Nothing shows up as 8/4 (today)

Perplexed as I justed added the action, I see it, but no file appears to change/update?

[Kurt Gold · Accepted solution]

On an English (US) Windows OS the file should be located here:

<OSDisk>\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator <version number> Settings\en_US\x64\Adobe Illustrator Prefs

Perhaps it is a hidden file, so you may have to enable the Show hidden files option in your Folder Options.

[clutch-cargo]

Got it!  I was looking under the main program not Users appdata.  All my latest custom actions are loaded.  You made my day!