Krita (Confusion over How to Backup Brushes and Use them later)

[lornem]

Hi, I want to backup my Brushes so I have a copy if something goes wrong with Krita.

I have been referring to the Krita Manual and this thread (see link below) for help. It’s a bit confusing though. Seems there are differing opinions as to how to do this.

Saving brush settings?

@gmckay60 if your laptop has a USB port you should be able to save your brushes and any other important data to a USB stick. Open Krita and go to settings - manage resources. Near the bottom of that panel you’ll see “open resource folder.” Click that and you should see a folder “paintoppresets.” In that folder you should see your brush files with the names you gave them. All you need to do is copy those brush files to the USB stick. Make sure you don’t lose the “_” character in the file names. …

I want to be able to reload my custom brushes with the same settings but I see differing opinions and don’t understand what is the best method?

1. Is it better to just copy the “paintoppresets.” to a USB for backup? or…

2. Is it better to copy the whole Krita folder to a USB.

3. I see the ‘Brushes’ folder also has my custom Brushes. Do I need to back that one up too?

Also, someone said copy the ‘kritarc’ and ‘kritashortcutsrc’ configuration files over to the appropriate locations to keep the ‘look and feel and behaviour’.

4. This raises another question. If I don’t save the ‘kritarc’ and ‘kritashortcutsrc’ configuration files separately then my brushes won’t load with their ‘look and feel and behaviour’? Confused.

This is all a little confusing.

[kacart]

I just copy/backup the entire Krita directory under my user/AppData/Roaming…
that way you get the brush libraries and custom brush libraries and etc…

[Michelist]

Correct, copy the whole folder. And “kritarc” & “kritashortcutsrc” have nothing to do with your resources for painting, these are for the settings of the UI and the shortcuts of Krita.

Michelist

[tachiko]

Kind of on topic, I’ve been wondering if there was a way to export brushes as .Kpp files?

Also a great way to back up easier is to rename all your brush following a name convention. (As a way to group them by name). Then it’s easy to find them when making bundles.
Its just a bit time consuming to rename individually.
I made a thread: asking for that.
Batch rename brushes prefix

[AhabGreybeard]

kritarc and kritashortcutsrc are useful to backup in case you mess up the settings/shortcuts and want to return to a previous ‘known to be good’ state, or if you have some kind of data disaster with your computer.

They are also very useful if you’re migrating your krita installation to a new computer.

[lornem]

Thanks.

Where is: User/App Data/Roaming

I’m new to Windows and don’t know how to find those folders. Can you please give me the path to copy the Krita Directory?

[AhabGreybeard]

C:\Users\{your username}\AppData\Roaming\krita is the resources folder.
You can right-click → Copy it then paste it to a USB stick or some internal backup folder though a USB stick is a better place to store important backups.

The kritarc and kritashortcutsrc files are in C:\Users\{your username}\AppData\Local

[AhabGreybeard]

@tachiko

I’ve been wondering if there was a way to export brushes as .Kpp files?

I just copy/paste them out of the resources folder to wherever I want then to be.
The neat and tidy way, if you have more than one and want to keep them together, is to create a bundle and put them into it.

[lornem]

Thanks. Is this the folder you save because it’s huge. Wouldn’t it be better to save a smaller file with just the brushes?

[AhabGreybeard]

That is the folder. 457MB isn’t all that big for such a lot of lovely resources.

It is possible to copy just particular brush presets and any associated brush tips and any associated patterns out of their subfolders in the krita resources folder and store the copies somewhere.

Later, it is possible to copy those particular resources back to where they came from in case there was a problem with them.

However, you’d have to figure out where they came from, put them back in the appropriate subfolder and then probably delete the messed up originals that you were trying to ‘fix’.
Then you’d probably have to rebuild the database file.
There may be further complications depending on exactly what you’re doing or trying to do.

It doesn’t cost you anything to make a full backup for later full restoration so why not do it?
Also, the resources folder contains very important things besides the ‘brushes’ so a full backup is the simplest way to guarentee recovery in case of disaster.
Also, make regular full backups, especially after you’ve made any changes to resources.

[lornem]

Awesome. Thanks. I’ll just backup the whole thing then. Thanks.