Lightroom Brushes completely gone

[metaherr]

Im very upset with this program right now, for a multitude of reasons. I even upgraded my computer and somehow it seems like things are getting worse. It's SO slow, I mean screen going black with the spinning pointer once every few minutes, brushes not even covering all the space I've drawn over by the time the program catches up to where my pointer is and skipping, having to optimize my catalog every 20 minutes and reboot at least 5 times a day just to be able to click on something and it respond less than 5 minutes later, slow. At first I understood because the file I was working on first had begun to collect over a dozen masks, but now im working with files that haven't even been touched before and on the first mask I'm having serious problems. I mean, I honestly don't even know what to do. I upgraded my ssd and ram, purchased a cooling pad, changed all my settings, have NO other programs running and even clear unnecessary processes in task manager. Im working on a folder with 40 photos in it, only two of which now have more than three masks. Today, while working on a jpeg, for whatever reason I got to a certain point in my edit when suddenly the program literally would not let me go any further. If I changed any setting at all or added a brush stroke it would just revert to the original photo, settings, masks, and all. The only way to undo it would be to undo the previous step. I reinstalled my driver, rebooted Lightroom, rebooted my computer, deleted the preferences file, and it still did it. Thankfully because it was a jpeg I could just save it where it was and import the new jpeg but if I was working on a raw file I would be absolutely screwed. 

And now, my brushes are gone. I was literally using them 2 hours ago when I closed my screen to step away and I come back and they've just vanished. They aren't in Lightroom, they aren't in the folders, they aren't even in my backup folder in my documents. They're literally all missing, I can't find them anywhere, and have no idea how Lightroom could have even done this or how to fix it.

Today has taken me back so far in my work and I don't know how I'll even recover what's been lost.

I feel like I can't trust the software anymore and it's incredibly disheartening. I couldn't find any help online so I'm here now. Has anyone else had this happen and how did you get your work back? How do I prevent Lightroom from ruining what I've done and deleting my files?

[kentdesign]

Wow that IS a lot. Sounds like something was not not installed properly - which can happen with all computers.

The best way one of us here can help is for you to list your computer operating system, RAM, and your version of Lightroom. Sounds like you already increased the RAM, so that should not be the problem.

As for losing the files, LR cannot move the files unless you tell it to. So where do you keep your lightroom catalog - the file that ends in .lrcat? Default is usually in Pictures or my pictures. And where are your photo themselves stored? On that computer, on a separate external disk?  

With that info, one of us can try to help.

[kentdesign]

And which brushes disappeared?

[metaherr]

I'm working on Windows 10 Home, have 32 GB ram, and my version of Lightroom is 11.4, updated today before posting this reply. 

I ended up restoring my brushes through a backup I had on my external hard drive, thankfully. I haven't had Lightroom delete brushes again since so I have no idea what happened there. The brushes that disappeared were just a specific set of brushes I had collected, I organize them into folders by type and rename them to sort them within Lightroom since they haven't added a way to organize brushes. I just shut down Lightroom and switch out the folders depending on which brushes I need at the moment (Light, Color, Landscape, Detail, Retouching, etc) and then reboot to use them. I hadn't shut down Lightroom at the time when my brushes disappeared, they disappeared between the time I shut my laptop to when I opened it back up, the program still running.

I managed to improve the performance issues, I have to add each photo to its own individual collection and work with it in that collection then delete the collection when I'm done. If I do this I can work without the program crashing randomly or not allowing me to add brush strokes or other things that impede my ability to work. I also recently just deleted all my presets, for the set I'm working on I don't need them and I was getting so frustrated waiting minutes just to click on a photo and right click to change the label and I'm already very late on this project so I just had no choice. 

My Lightroom catalog is stored in Pictures, and my photos are also mostly stored in Pictures. The photos I'm working with right now are stored in Pictures.

Today I had another file do the thing I described in my original post where all my edits are randomly deleted and I'm stuck not being able to move any further. I have a brush mask that isn't complete, and when I go to add to the mask then let go of the brush, after a few seconds the photo completely resets to its raw state, all settings and masks gone. If I hit undo it all comes back, but trying to do anything else then resets it again, leaving me with a half finished photo I now have to discard permanently because I can't finish it. I have no idea how to fix it. It's one of the better photos in this set so it's pretty disappointing that it's now unusable