Brushes gone?

[Boob]

Please follow my story of woes as I desribe what I THINK happened to my brushes:

I'm logged into my account all the time.  I have a personal profile.  My general practice is to always merge preferences when updating apps.  Whatever that check box is, it's checked.  Never had an issue.

Then, I joined a shared group that uses Adobe apps for my work.  So I logged out of my personal profile, logged back in, now clicking to join the group I am not part of.  I then chose the company profile instead of my personal profile.

Everything was fine.  Then I updated Photoshop.  And I THINK, under this new company profile, I didn't pay attention to the "merge preferences?" check box.  By default, I believe Adobe does NOT merge preferences and so I blindly updated and missed this message.

So then I think Photoshop updated, it wiped my preferences.  Most importantly, my brushes.

I tried logging out and logging back in with my personal profile, but the damage was done.

Does this seem correct?  I'm making some assumptions, because I don't know why else my brushes would be gone.  I'm assuming I stupidly missed the checkbox when I updated Photoshop because I wasn't used to clicking "merge preferences" under the new profile.

And so, there's no good way to get them back now, right?

I'm on a Mac but I don't use time machine.  I have plenty of brushes downloaded and saved locally, but I gotta reorganize them all into my various different folders/collections now, and a few custom brushes I made are gone.

I'm screwed right?  Just give it to me straight...

[kevin stohlmeyer · Accepted solution]

Hindsight is ... well you know. You should be saving your custom presets to a separate location to prevent this. Otherwise you can check this documentation to see if they are still somewhere that can be migrated. However if you have never saved out your custom .abr files, then you may be at a loss.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/preset-migration.html

[Boob]

Thanks - yeah, I save everything locally, never mess with the cloud, but I've never cared to look into exporting and importing presets.  I will now.  Tried to migrate old presets, but no go (which makes sense because Photoshop overrides itself when installing, so I have no previous version to migreate from.  Anyway, thanks for the link.  It did actually inform me.

[Trevor.Dennis]

It's worth checking the previous version presets folder, which might still have your presets.

The beta version has a different presets folder to the release version, so if you have that installed, they might be there.

I personally keep my brush presets in a My Docs folder, and place a shortcut to them in the Photoshop presets folder.  This safeguards them against catastrophes, and means that when I add a new ,abr file, it is available in all versiions.  There is obviously some housework to tidy up if making new presets inside Photoshop.