IntelliJ IDE configuration constantly dropping

Hi there,

I'm certain this is down to 'user error' and understanding how IDEA config works, but hopefully you can help. I have a uni project which consists of several distinct IDEA projects. When I reopen the projects, the project configuration regularly disappears. Typically app server, dependencies, content root, sdk, artifacts, war file. Often all of them. This means in order to just get the code to recompile in a working state, I have to manually re add all these dependencies. This is a major overhead and i'm finding i'm doing 20% coding, 80% IDE config.

Could you help explain why this might be? Is there some central config file perhaps, that's getting overwritten / reset each time I close my project? The projects themselves don't interact. The JARs and project folder structures are in exactly the same place and haven't moved.