BackupDesk – Scheduled Backups for Windows
Protect today. Restore anytime.
BackupDesk backs up your folders on a schedule and gets them back when you need them. You describe what to protect, where it goes and when it runs — then a background service does the work, whether or not the window is open. Full, differential and incremental levels, retention that prunes whole chains rather than orphaning a backup, snapshots of files that are open, and restores that are checked file-by-file against the hash recorded when they were backed up.
Download Version 1.0.2
Available on the Microsoft Store — free for one backup job with every feature unlocked, optional one-time Pro upgrade removes the job limit.
Or view the listing at apps.microsoft.com.
An unplugged drive is not a failure
If the destination is not there when a backup is due, the job waits instead of failing — and starts on its own the moment you plug the drive back in. A job that failed every night because a USB disk was disconnected would only teach you to ignore failures, so BackupDesk does not do that.
Changelog — what's new in each release
Full release history from 1.0.0 — the change-detection engine, three backup levels, scheduling and the job queue, retention, snapshots of open files, remote sources, compression, encryption and the one-time Pro upgrade.
View the full changelogUser Guide — every step explained
A plain-English walkthrough of creating a job, choosing backup levels, retention, restoring, verifying, remote sources, compression, encryption and the free vs. Pro difference.
Read the User GuideFeatures
🗂️ Three backup levels
Full stands alone. Differential stores everything changed since the last full and needs only that full. Incremental stays small every day but forms a chain. BackupDesk shows you the trade-off exactly where you make the choice.
⏰ Schedules & presets
Build your own schedule, or pick a preset: Standard, Most resilient, Smallest daily backups, or Manual only. Presets are starting points you can edit afterwards — not locked modes.
⚡ Fast after the first run
The first backup copies everything; after that BackupDesk skips unchanged files by size and modification time without reading them. Files that did change are read and hashed with SHA-256, so a touched-but-identical file is correctly recognised as unchanged.
🧹 Retention that prunes chains
Keep the last N chains — a full plus everything depending on it, always pruned as a whole. BackupDesk tells you when it prunes, never deletes your only remaining chain even if the disk is full, and never prunes a chain you are restoring from.
📸 Snapshots of open files
Files locked by another program are captured through a Windows volume snapshot, so a running database or an open document does not silently drop out of the backup. A file that still could not be read is listed, never quietly skipped.
↩️ Restore by time or by search
Browse a backup set as the folder tree looked at that moment, or search a filename across every set to see all its versions with dates. Restore everything or just the items you tick, to a folder you choose or the original locations.
🔎 Verify against bit-rot
Re-read a stored backup set and check every file against its recorded hash — catching a disk that has quietly corrupted a file nothing has touched in a year. Works on encrypted backups too, and does not need the password to do it.
🌐 Remote sources over FTP, FTPS & SFTP
A source folder can live on another machine. Test connection runs from the background service, so a successful test is evidence the 2am run will connect too. SSH host keys must be accepted up front rather than trusted silently.
🗜️ Optional compression
Per job: Faster, Balanced or Smaller. Already-compressed content — JPEG, MP4, ZIP, Office documents — is stored as-is rather than burned through the processor for a result that comes out larger.
🔐 Optional encryption
Turn it on per job and file contents and filenames are protected with AES-256-GCM. A one-time recovery key opens the backups if the password is ever lost, and scheduled runs never stop to ask for one.
🎚️ Stays out of your way
The Low impact default runs at background priority on half the cores, so a backup never makes the machine feel slow. Balanced and Full speed are there for a maintenance window, and throughput can be capped on a shared network.
📦 Backups you can read without the app
Each backup set is a plain, self-describing folder — a manifest, a per-file list with hashes, and your files stored whole rather than chopped into a shared blob store. There is no central database to lose, and uninstalling removes no backup.
Common Uses
💼 Nightly protection for a work machine
A full once a month, a differential every week and an incremental every other day — the Standard preset — onto an external drive, running at background priority while you work.
🖥️ Pulling a server's files down
Point a job at a folder on another machine over FTP, FTPS or SFTP and keep a scheduled, versioned copy on a local drive or network share — connection tested from the service that will actually run it.
🗄️ Archives on a drive in a drawer
Keep long-term sets on a disk that spends most of its life disconnected, then run Verify occasionally to prove every file still matches the hash recorded when it was written.
🔒 Backups that leave the building
Turn on encryption for a job and neither the contents nor the filenames are readable by whoever finds the drive — while scheduled runs continue unattended and Verify still works without the password.
Latest Release
Version 1.0.2 — August 2026
First-run approval now completes correctly on a standard, non-administrator Windows account — two fixes confirmed end-to-end on a clean machine. Everything else shipped in 1.0.0: the change-detection engine, three backup levels, scheduling, retention, snapshots of open files, remote sources, compression and encryption.