Lost all my settings when upgrading to Premiere 2019

[bsarfatty]

Everything is back to default. None of my settings moved over! Years of tweaking the keyboard layout and preferences. And no way to reference what I had to rebuild it.

In the past when this has happened, I've dug into library/preferences/adobe/Premiere Pro/[ver] and started copying and pasting.

I tried copying and pasting the entire settings folder. Nothing works. Copied the .kys folders to many places. Synching the settings to the cloud (which I think overwrote the existing settings with the blank default ones). Tried even using time machine to restore the old version of Premiere, which wouldn't launch.

Please help!

[davidarbor · Accepted solution]

You definitely don't want to copy and paste the whole folder. Syncing settings to the cloud only syncs between major versions, which is necessary, since preferences can be added, removed, or changed between major versions. Your preferences would be stored in your ~/Documents/Adobe/Premiere Pro folder. Go there, find the 12.0 folder, then you can copy your keyboard shortcuts, track height presets, etc. General prefs should only take about 2 minutes to reconfigure, so I'd recommend doing those manually, as opposed to trying to bring over the previous version, although you certainly can.

[bsarfatty]

This isn't working. That's what I'm saying.

In the 12.0 folder, I see .kys Keyboard layout folders in

/Users/brian/Library/Preferences/Adobe/Premiere Pro/12.0/Profile-CreativeCloud-/Mac

/Users/brian/Library/Preferences/Adobe/Premiere Pro/12.0/Profile-CreativeCloud-/Layouts

I am looking in the 13.0 folder. The default settings don't have any corresponding folders with .kys files or the UserWorkspace.xml files.

I tried copying just the "Profile-CreativeCloud-" folder. That doesn't work.

I even tried creating a new dummy custom keyboard layout in 2019/v13 to see if it would generate a folder with .kys files so I could see where to put them. No dice.

The only thing I can figure is that v2019 somehow stores preferences differently than previous versions? Can someone from AdobeSupport​ chime in?

[davidarbor]

Right, but as I mentioned above, check your ~/Documents folder, not your Library folder.

[bsarfatty]

Ahhhh. I was looking at something before that says on a Mac that preferences were stored in that folder in the Library. I presumed "documents" was the equivalent Windows path. Thanks. Got it working.

[bsarfatty]

Hmm. I tried uninstalling 2019 with the option to remove all settings. Reinstalling 2018. Which when I opened 2018 it preserved my settings. Synched settings to the cloud again just to make sure. Then updated to 2019 (keeping previous version this time),

2019 still doesn't bring over any settings. Tried download setting from the cloud (double checking it was set to force download). No dice.

I guess I'm sticking with 2018 until Adobe gives me a solution.

[synergist]

This also happened to me (just opened 2019 for the first time today), and I am not clear about which settings are which in the ~/Documents/Adobe/Premiere Pro folder. I assume I'm looking inside the Profile-username folder, not the Profile-Creative Cloud folder, although in both I see a subfolder called Settings. I don't see anything that looks like keyboard shortcuts there or anywhere else in either profile folder. I do see a file called Adobe Premiere Pro Prefs. Should I copy that from the 12.0 to the 13.0 folder, or are these the general preferences you're saying I can reset manually in 2 minutes?

I also tried downloading synced prefs from Creative Cloud; nothing happened. All default settings in PP 2019. No saved effects favorites, or ingest presets, or keyboard shortcuts, or anything I've been saving over the last two years.

Is this supposed to happen? Should I contact Adobe support? Just looking for your suggestions.

[davidarbor]

Syncing prefs only works between major versions, so 2018 prefs won't sync down to 2019. Major things can often change between those big versions, so you don't want to overwrite your prefs folder completely with the previous year's because you might never learn about certain new features. The most basic thing I can think of is when the team adds a new default workspace, but there are others.

The "Profile-Creative Cloud" folder is actually where your prefs will live (I think they might get moved into this folder only after you sync your prefs to the cloud the first time, but my prefs are always. The General prefs aren't in the "Settings" folder, that's more for things like track and overlay presets, etc. The file in the root of the "Profile-Creative Cloud" folder called "Adobe Premiere Pro Prefs" is your general prefs file, and yeah, that's the one that takes almost no time at all to reconfigure.

I switched from Mac to Win earlier this year, so I can't remember for sure, but I thought KB shortcuts are stored in a folder called "kys" (the KB shrotcut file will have a .kys extension if you want to just search for them). On Windows they're in a folder called "Win" inside the "prefs-creative cloud" folder.

So far everything you said seems pretty normal, but even so, it can be a pain when prefs don't migrate. When you upgraded from 2018 to 2019, did you uncheck the box in the CC app to migrate preferences forward? By default this should happen automatically if you're upgrading all apps at once (via the little blue link that says "Update All" at the top of the app list, but if you update each app individually the process is slightly different, so perhaps you told the CC app not to migrate prefs forward?

[synergist]

Thanks, David. Found everything. The keyboard shortcuts were in a subfolder in the Profile-Creative Cloud folder called "Mac." Not sure why this happened; pretty sure I just did what I always do with updates, which is leave the migrate-prefs box checked, but it's entirely possible that I momentarily lost my mind.

[edu.hilario]

Thanks!!!