Recovering lost grids

Feb 8, 2016 | Written byCameron McEfee

GuideGuide 4.2.0 fixes an issue that caused GuideGuide’s memory to reset after Photoshop updates. In most cases you can still find your old data on your computer, however GuideGuide isn’t able to recover it for you automatically. If you experienced this issue and lost any grids that you’d like to recover, here’s how to do it.

Please note, following this process will erase any existing GuideGuide data and replace it with the old data. It also involves mucking with files. While making a mistake won’t ruin Photoshop or GuideGuide, you might permanently erase or corrupt your GuideGuide data. Be sure to make backups of the folders you’re changing before doing anything too crazy.

  1. Quit Photoshop.

  2. Open the Photoshop caches folders:

    OS X /Users/<USERNAME>/Caches/CSXS/cep_cache

    Windows C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\Temp\cep_cache

  3. Note in the caches folder there are one or more folders named PHXS_<VERSION>_com.cameronmcefee.guideguide. These are GuideGuide’s caches, one for each version of Photoshop you’ve used. Find the GuideGuide cache for your current version of Photoshop (we’ll call it “destination”) and the GuideGuide cache for the version of Photoshop that has your data (we’ll call it “source”). It’s probably the version before your current version.

  4. Make a copy of source and destination cache folders to your desktop, to be used as a backup, just in case.

  5. Replace the Local Storage folder in your destination cache with the Local Storage folder from your source cache. Say “yes” to overwriting any files.

  6. Restart Photoshop and open GuideGuide. Your data should appear as it did before.

If all went well, you can delete your backup caches from your desktop and celebrate. If something went wrong, put your backup caches back and try again.

If things really get messed up, simply delete the GuideGuide caches and GuideGuide will rebuild everything the next time it launches.