Save user settings on the fly instead of when Photoshop closes

[Sarah Northway]

Photoshop crashes about once for every 10 hours of use, so maybe once a week for me. This is normal. It's been this way for over 20 years through many versions on many different computers. It's just an unstable piece of software, especially if your job involves large complex files, and I've long ago come to terms with that. I save my work often and am glad for automatic backups and recovery files.

My work is protected, but my list of recently opened files is not. My changes to windows arrangements, tools, and settings are not. All of these things are only saved to the filesystem when Photoshop exits cleanly, which some weeks is a rare occurance.

So my suggestion is, save all those various user settings, recently open file lists and so on either right when they are changed, or on a regular timer like automatic backups, rather than waiting until the program exits. If the files can't be edited at runtime or this might introduce further instability, create temporary backups instead and prioritize loading those on boot.

[PECourtejoie]

Hi, constant crashes are not normal, and should not happens for 20 years in a row. There's been crashing bugs, granted, but I'm wondering why you seem to be so affected by the issue.

Some users recommend to use an action to setup preferences, I guess via insert menu items.

There's also the manual method of copying the preferences folder to the desktop, to save a working copy: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/preferences.html/#Manually

But indeed, it would be useful to be able to mandate a backup of said preferences.