I've been trying out Krita over the past few days and can't seem to figure it out. It recently deleted all of my presets I had created, made duplicates of the ones I made afterwards, and then when I deleted those and accidentally deleted some default presets.

I have no idea how to bring them back, I can't find anything in the program itself and the folders in the installation directory are like a maze. I can't find the .blacklist file from Linux either. Does anyone know how I can solve this? I would install Linux and use it but I need windows for work and switching between them isn't really viable.

The blacklist should be in

/windows/Users/Boudewijn\ Rempt/AppData/Roaming/.krita/share/apps/krita/

(well, translated to your username and windows file conventions -- I've just rebooted to Linux myself

I can't seem to find anything about Krita other than the start menu folder in Program data (has a shortcut and an uninstall link), another shortcut on my desktop and the installation directory in program files.

I can't find any presets I have created either.

It does store files on the C drive right? The installer refused to let me put it anywhere else so I assume it does.

Yes, a search may not have found it initially because AppData will be a hidden directory.
The only reason why the preferences would not be on the C:\ drive would be because your user account profile is not on the C:\ drive.

You should be able to enable the display of hidden folders in Explorer > Tools > Folder Options (pressing the Alt/Ctrl key may be required to make the tools menu visible).

Ah right, I didn't see the "." in there.

So I find the folder and remove everything from the .blacklist file (well the begin file/end file bits anyway, not the other stuff)? I did that, saved and restarted Krita but I still have no brushes at all (the defaults are still in the install directory and the custom ones I made are in the .krita folder in app data) and I found no mention at all of the default brushes in the blacklist file, only the custom ones.

I managed to get my brushes to work again (only the custom ones) by copying the presets from the app data folder and moving it to the install directory, so it seems there is another blacklist file somewhere or Krita isn't refreshing. One solution is to just duplicate all of my files whenever I accidentally delete something but it's not really a long term fix, I'd settle for disabling the delete button though

It just seems like a lot of work to restore a deleted preset, couldn't the deleted brushes just be moved to an unused folder in the main directory?

Well, usually you don't have rights to write in the system directory where Krita is installed. I'm going to spend a bit of time making a nice dialog for restoring presets.

That would be really awesome, thanks