by squirt in the turns » Thursday Mar 31, 2011 12:41 pm
Sorry I'm weighing in a bit late, and without any advice that'll help anyway...
Beersmith stores all recipes, ingredients, water profiles, settings, etc, in its installation path (by default, this is the Program Files folder on your system partition). They're stored in .bsm files - for example, recipes.bsm includes all recipes. Beersmith also appears to take automatic backups of all the .bsm files, which appear as .bak files, e.g. yeast_1.bak (these reside in Program Files too, so will not help in the event of loss of that entire folder anyway).
These .bsm files are the ones you want to take copies of. Restoring them straight back into Program Files\Beersmith\ will get everything set up exactly as it was when they were backed up.
Logging in using a seperate user profile wouldn't make any difference, as the Program Files folder is by default at the very least readable by all users, so that they can run programs. An exception to this is if Beersmith was installed in a different location that other user profiles can't access, or if certain users have had access to Program Files\Beersmith\ revoked.
Beyond that, Beersmith allows you to export any individiual item, or a group of items of the same type, as a .bsm file, or a choice of other formats (xml, plain text) and save them wherever you like.