GUARD

A portable, fully accessible backup and data-protection utility for Windows. GUARD lets you back up your chosen folders to any destination (a local drive, an external disk, or a network share) and keep an inventory of your installed apps so they are easy to reinstall after a clean OS install. It carries no installer and no dependencies to track down: the shipping release is a small GUARD.zip you extract to a self-contained GUARD\ folder, then run the GUARD.exe inside.

The goal is to become the ultimate portable data-protection toolkit. More functionality to come!

Pre-release: Expect rough edges and many future improvements.

This is the WinUI 3 edition, a ground-up rewrite of the original WPF version (now retired) built for far better screen-reader support and native dark-mode theming. It targets .NET 10 + Windows App SDK 1.8.

Current Features

• File backup to any folder: local, external, or a network share.
• Additive or Mirror copy modes (built on Robocopy): Additive only adds new and changed files and never deletes anything at the destination; Mirror makes the destination match the source exactly.
• Folder- and file-name exclusions, one per line, so you can skip caches, temp folders, or specific file types.
• Preview (dry-run) mode that shows what a backup would do without changing anything, per-folder progress, and a saved log of the last run.
• Optional scheduled task so backups run unattended on the days and at the time you set (pick any mix of weekdays: all seven for daily, one for weekly).
• App Inventory: lists your installed apps from the Windows registry, marks the ones winget can reinstall, and exports the list as plain JSON.
• Dark / light Mica theming that follows the Windows setting automatically.
• Screen-reader-first design (see Accessibility below)

Planned Features & Improvements

• A menu bar and further UX polish.
• More backup scheduling options (e.g. hourly, monthly).
• Multi-version retention (keep previous backup versions, not just the latest).
• More granular progress reporting and cleaner output text.
• New capabilities such as full system images and application-data export / import.

Requirements

• Windows 10 version 1809 (build 17763) or later, including Windows 11. Note that Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14, 2025; GUARD still runs there, but it is outside Microsoft's support window for the Windows App SDK.
• Nothing to install to run it. The GUARD.exe inside the release zip is self-contained: the .NET 10 runtime and Windows App SDK are bundled inside it.
• winget (optional) for automatic app reinstalls. Without it, the app list is still read from the registry and can be exported for reference.
• To build from source you need the .NET 10 SDK (see Building).

Building

Shipping build: single-file GUARD.exe in a release zip (recommended)

publish-singlefile.cmd

Produces one ~88 MB GUARD.exe (self-contained, compressed, ReadyToRun), staged inside a GUARD\ folder alongside README.md and zipped to GUARD.zip in the project root. The bundled runtime extracts once to a per-user temp cache and is reused on later launches (it does not scatter DLLs beside the exe). Being a portable app, GUARD writes its working files (backup-settings.ini, guard-backup.cmd, Logs\) into the folder the exe sits in, so shipping it inside a folder keeps everything together instead of littering the folder the zip was downloaded to.

Build and run (development)

dotnet build -r win-x64 -c Debug

Alternative: folder publish (not single-file)

dotnet publish -r win-x64 -c Release

Output folder: bin\Release\net10.0-windows10.0.19041.0\win-x64\publish\ (self-contained; ~285 files, the exe needs the DLLs beside it).

Project layout

Path	Purpose
Models/	FolderPair, AppEntry, Settings, AppListFile (+ System.Text.Json source-gen context)
Services/	Settings I/O, backup-script generation, scheduled tasks, winget + registry scan, JSON I/O, process helpers
MainWindow.xaml(.cs)	Both tabs and all wiring
Views/	FolderDialog, AboutDialog (ContentDialogs)
publish-singlefile.cmd	Build the shipping GUARD.exe and stage it into GUARD.zip
publish-aot.cmd	Opt-in NativeAOT publish (see note below)
GUARD\, GUARD.zip	The staged release folder and its zip (project root; not source)

Usage

GUARD has two tabs.

File Backup. Add one or more source/destination folder pairs, choose Additive or Mirror, and optionally list folder and file names to exclude. Scheduling is off by default; tick Run a scheduled backup, choose which weekdays it runs on (all seven for daily, one for weekly, or any custom mix) and the time, if you want it to run unattended. Preview shows what the backup would do without touching anything; Save Settings writes backup-settings.ini and a standalone guard-backup.cmd (which can be run independently of the main app), and (if scheduling is enabled) registers the Windows scheduled task GUARD Backup. Because the generated script is self-contained, your backups keep running on schedule whether or not GUARD itself is open.

App Inventory. Scans the Windows uninstall registry for your installed apps and marks the ones winget can reinstall. You can export the full list to JSON and use it to reinstall the winget-capable apps after an OS reinstall.

Exported app list

The App Inventory export is plain, indented JSON you can open in any text editor. Each entry records the app name, version, publisher, and (where known) its winget package id, so you can also run winget install --id <id> yourself.

Accessibility

Accessibility is the reason this app exists. Some current accessibility-related efforts include the folder and app lists being built from real check boxes rather than a grid or list view, so a screen reader announces each row's own checked / unchecked state with no selection-versus-check confusion. Within a list:

• Tab treats the whole list as one stop - Tab enters the list once and the next Tab leaves it, instead of stepping through every row.
• Arrow keys move between rows, and Space toggles the focused check box.
• Focus is remembered - tabbing back into a list returns you to the row you were last on, not the top.

NativeAOT (not currently usable)

publish-aot.cmd builds a true native binary (-p:PublishAot=true) inside the VC x64 developer environment. It compiles and links, but the resulting exe crashes at startup (0xc000027b in Microsoft.UI.Xaml.dll) the moment a data-templated list renders. This reproduces under both .NET 9 and .NET 10 with Windows App SDK 1.8: it is believed to be a current WinUI-3-under-AOT XAML/binding limitation (see microsoft/WindowsAppSDK discussion #3856). The shipping build is therefore ReadyToRun, not AOT. Will revisit AOT in the future, but am open to development assistance in this regard.

Contributing & branching

GUARD uses a simple trunk-based workflow:

• main is always releasable. Every commit on main should build and run. Tagged commits on main are the releases.
• Work happens on short-lived branches off main, one per change, named by type: feature/<short-name>, fix/<short-name>, chore/<short-name>, docs/<short-name>. Open a pull request into main, then delete the branch after it merges. Branches live hours-to-days, not weeks.
• Releases are git tags using SemVer with a v prefix (v0.1.0). Each tag gets a GitHub Release with the built GUARD.zip attached as an asset (the binary is gitignored, so the Release is where it ships).
• Every change updates CHANGELOG.md under [Unreleased]; cutting a release moves those entries under the new version heading.

Licence

GUARD is released under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for the full text.

---

GUARD is developed by PlanetLinux98.