Why does copying our UI layouts and hotbars from character to character need to be...

[Kemiko]

It's not difficult or convoluted. The Server Backup allows you to upload your character configuration settings (as well as crossbars, hotbars and UI) of which you can download onto other characters or devices.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/game_manual/config/

Just CTRL+F Server Backup Function for the how-to.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

It's not difficult or convoluted. The Server Backup allows you to upload your character configuration settings (as well as crossbars, hotbars and UI) of which you can download onto other characters or devices.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/game_manual/config/

Just CTRL+F Server Backup Function for the how-to.

You can literally upload your characters UI settings by clicking the gear icon at the loggin screen and selecting upload and then download those settings amongst any of your alts across all platforms.

Dont tell me you didnt know about this

Due to the fact that system backups character specific data such as friends list/triple triad cards & character specific macros, you cannot export the data to a different character, only bringing it back to the same character as before.
You could have taken the 1min to easily see this in-game before suggesting this as a solution when its completely irrelevant to the OP's problem.

But yes OP, it's extremely annoying to swap settings between characters. The best way I've found is to sort your character folder location by date modified, and whenever you create a new character, it will be the lowest / highest (depending on ascending/descending) on the list. For finding older characters, you can go in-game on that character, create a brand new macro in their character specific macro window, logout so the files update, then go into the FF14 character folder location and search 'Macro'. The file with the latest modification date will be that character, then you can right click -> open file location and it should take you right to that folder of that character.

For finding your main you want to copy settings from, do the same macro trick as above, but once you find the character folder for your main, create a text file named after your character in that folder. then instead of having to do the whole macro thing in the future, you can just search the text file name and it will locate your main's folder to skip a step.

This is with Windows 10, if you run 11 I dunno if anything might have changed.