“I read it on the Internet so it must be true” warning: I’ve had the GT-1000 for 5 months. I don’t claim to be an expert. I’m documenting this because I wasn’t able to find a concise explanation of it. As far as I know, what I’ve explained is correct. It works for me, but be cautious if your custom patches are of value to you.

TL;DR

I had two assumptions about how this stuff works, and both were wrong:

• First, that exporting a liveset to the pedal would overwrite everything in the User list. It doesn’t: if your set has say 5 patches, they are simply copied to slots U001 – U005, overwriting whatever was there before.
• Secondly, that if you wanted to restore whatever was originally in the User list, you could just copy from the Presets. You can’t in the Librarian (I’ll come back to this).

User Patch Backup and Starting State

Before you do anything else, create a liveset which is a backup of all of the out-of-the-box User patches. Use the shift key for multi-select.

I’m now going to immediately contradict this, in the context of how to restore the User patches to the starting condition (without a reset). It’s useful to have the pristine copy of everything – and copying from this list to other livesets is quicker than copying over USB from the User list on the pedal – but in reality I don’t anticipate I’ll ever want to write the full list back. So I’ve also created an ‘Original First Five’ list which allows me to get back to square one: your mileage may vary on the maximum size you want to use. Five is fine for me. This approach will make sense when we start switching between livesets.

Let’s now create a test liveset from a random selection of patches:

We now hit the export button in the top right, and select the pedal:

…and we overwrite the original User presets in U001 – U005. U001 was Premium Drive, and now…

And finally, to get back to Square One, I’ll export my ‘Original First Five’ back to the pedal:

It is possible to ‘restore’ from the Presets list in the Editor: if you just toggle the FX1 button (twice to its original state), the Write option becomes available. But this would be pretty tedious to do one at a time.