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How to backup/restore Lightroom's preferences

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vbnut

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Intermediate
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Classic
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic version: 12.1
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  1. Windows 10
  2. Windows 11
I've noticed that a common suggestion for folks encountering strange behavior from Lightroom is to delete (really move) or reset the preferences. Fortunately, while using LR since 2008, I never had the need to do that, but i do wonder how I would recover my settings if I did. If the preference really are corrupted, restoring the moved copy obviously won't work. Is there a recommended way to save my preferences so I could restore them after resetting them, other than making screen shots of all the tabs of the preferences and catalog settings dialogs?

This also might be helpful for copying settings from my desktop computer where I do most of my photo processing to my laptop since I have my catalog on a TB3 M.2 SSD that I take with me and connect to my laptop when I travel.
 
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I assume people will simply go the preferences and set them up again. It’s not such a big deal, but you could make screenshots if you are not sure you would remember them.
 
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There is a file buried in a System folder that contains your Lightroom Preferences. (In MacOS the file has the extension "*.plist" I'm not sure of the path and name in Windows OS.) When you use your backup app to make a system backup of all of your critical files this folder should be included.
 
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vbnut said:
If the preference really are corrupted, restoring the moved copy obviously won't work.
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If your backup system retains multiple versions/restore points, one option is to restore a preferences file from a date before it got corrupted.

For example, if I find a problem with a file, I open my backup software (macOS Time Machine) and because it does regular incremental backups, I can restore the version of that file from yesterday afternoon. If that one is also bad, I can roll it back further to like 2 days ago or 5 days ago or a week ago, until I find a backup of it from when that file was still good.
 
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