How to fix your Adobe Illustrator Preferences

If you’ve ever run into a weird glitch, crashing issue, or a plugin behaving badly in Adobe Illustrator, you’re not alone. 

One of the easiest and most effective troubleshooting steps is to reset your Illustrator preferences. 

In this guide, we’ll show you how to reset, back up, and restore your preferences safely, so you can get back to creating without frustration. We’ll also explain how to prevent these issues from happening again in the future, and how easy it is to back up your preferences using Astute Manager Pro for free. You can even deploy them to another machine, share with your team, or save them for those moments when you need a quick reset. 

Why reset Illustrator preferences? 

It might sound drastic, but resetting your preferences in Adobe Illustrator is a tried-and-true fix for: 

• Glitches with panels or toolbars 

• Unexpected performance problems 

• Issues when upgrading to new versions 

• General instability or unexpected behavior 

Resetting preferences reverts settings to their default state, potentially clearing out corrupted data or settings that are causing problems. 

What happens after a reset? 

When you reset your preferences, Illustrator will return to its default state. Here’s what you can expect the next time you launch: 

• The default “Welcome” screen appears 

• You’ll need to manually reopen and dock panels (native and plugin-based) 

• Custom Workspaces, Keyboard Shortcuts, and Preferences will need to be re-applied 

This means if you didn’t have a safe backup of your Illustrator Preferences before your issues arose and forced you to reset them, you have to start again from scratch. Recreating your custom Workspaces and Keyboard Shortcuts, although not hugely time-consuming (what, 20 minutes-ish, maybe?) is still a pain to do and more than frustrating. 

We have two solutions for backing up and restoring your Adobe Illustrator Preferences: 

1. The quick way using Astute Manager Pro, which allows you to quickly keep safe backups of all your Illustrator Settings, Swatch Packs, Workspaces, custom toolbars, Save for Web Settings, and much more. 

2. The long manual way, which requires some file finder navigation. 

If you are currently troubleshooting after Illustrator has gone wrong and need to reset your preferences first, you could risk backing up a corrupted file. Please read the section below on how to reset Illustrator Preferences. 

How to back up and restore Illustrator preferences 

Option 1: The quick way 

1. Create an account with Astute Manager Pro for free

2. Download, install, and run the Astute Manager application, then sign in

3. Navigate to Asset Manager > Illustrator

4. Backup and store your current working Illustrator Preferences using the upload button

5. When needed, restore the backup using the download icon

6. Restart Adobe Illustrator

If you have multiple versions of Adobe Illustrator installed, you can also back up and save those settings easily using the version control dropdown menu. 

Option 2: The long way 

To back up preferences: 

• Ensure you first quit Adobe Illustrator and locate the Adobe Illustrator Prefs file

For macOS: 

1. In Finder, go to Go > Library (hold Option to see Library) 

2. Then navigate to Preferences > Adobe Illustrator [version] Settings > [language] 

3. Copy the "Adobe Illustrator Cloud Prefs" and "Adobe Illustrator Prefs" files to a safe location (e.g., desktop or cloud storage)

For Windows: 

1. Navigate to Users > [yourname] > AppData > Roaming > Adobe > Adobe Illustrator [version] Settings > [language/32/64-bit] 

2. Copy the "Adobe Illustrator Cloud Prefs" and "Adobe Illustrator Prefs" files to a safe location (e.g., desktop or cloud storage)

To restore your Preferences: 

1. Ensure you first quit Adobe Illustrator

2. Navigate to the same location as above

3. Copy your backup files back into the original folder

4. Restart Adobe Illustrator

How to reset Illustrator preferences 

There are two main ways to reset your preferences: 

Reset Preferences button in Illustrator:

In the Illustrator Preferences dialog (Ctrl/Command + K), you will find a Reset Preferences button:

Quick keyboard shortcut: 

For macOS 

• Hold Option + Command + Shift 

For Windows 

• Hold Alt + Ctrl + Shift 

Do this while launching Illustrator. A prompt will ask if you want to delete your settings—click Yes. 

Manual method: 

• Quit Illustrator

• Manually find the "Adobe Illustrator Cloud Prefs" and "Adobe Illustrator Prefs" files

• Delete them

This achieves the same result as the shortcut method but gives you full control. If the problem persists, you can delete the entire folder containing these files, as Illustrator will rebuild the contents on its next deployment.

Final thoughts: Store your preferences, save your sanity 

Resetting your Illustrator Preferences is one of those hidden tricks that every designer should know. Whether you’re dealing with plugin errors, UI glitches, or sluggish performance, a reset can breathe new life into your workflow. 

Just remember to back up your preferences before resetting, so you can store your settings safely and revert if needed.