Can I get my Steam categories back?

Question

During the Holiday sales, I logged in to Steam on a different computer (one powerful enough to actually run my games :). When I logged back in on my notebook, all of my categories except one were deleted, and all of the games except one were removed from my favourites and from the one remaining category.  I re-added some of them.

Later, after logging in again, I lost all my groups and favourites again. 
Is this behaviour common? Can I get them back, or at least back them up in the future?

edit: yesterday's patch (7. 10. 2015) seems to address this bug (release notes here):

Fixed bug causing category info to be missing from the Library in
  Offline Mode, and sometimes cleared permanently when going back online

Took at least 3 years, it seems.

(I have read this, but I'm not sure it's the exact same problem. Both my computers ran Windows and I lost my categorization entirely.)

Andrew Wonnacott · Accepted Answer

Copy $STEAM_DIRECTORY/userdata/$YOUR_LONG_NUMBER/7/remote/sharedconfig.vdf between computers or back it up.
Where $STEAM_DIRECTORY is:

Linux:  ~/.steam/steam
macOS ~/Library/Application Support/Steam
Windows: wherever you chose to install Steam (usually C:Program FilesSteam or
C:Program Files (x86)Steam).

Spectro · Answer

If your categories didn't sync, then you can't get them back.

Solly Karchefsky · Answer

Your categories need to sync to the Steam Cloud - if they didn't for some reason they won't save to your account and thus won't be available on other PCs.

Fueled · Answer

I just experienced the same issue, and found out on this thread that sometimes simply restarting Steam restores the categories; it worked for me.

I understand you probably have tried that already, but other people might benefit from this simple "solution".

Carolus · Answer

Andrew Wonnacott's answer didn't work for me. I tried deleting some other cache and config files as well, but no luck.
I fixed it this stupid way:

Turn on your second computer which has the correct game category state and which hasn't been connecting Steam to internet since the category mess up or deletion.
Disconnect internet (second computer).
Launch Steam (second computer).
Recreate manually the categories from the second computer (first computer).

Can I get my Steam categories back?

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