Kopia Desk is a Windows desktop application built with Electron that performs incremental backups of your local folders to external drives or USB sticks. It compares your files against a saved manifest, copies only what changed, and gives you full control over what gets backed up through a clean native interface.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/Pachanga12/Kopia_Desk_Beta_1/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
Installation
Install Kopia Desk on Windows — prerequisites, build from source, or run in development mode.
Quickstart
Back up your first folder in under five minutes with step-by-step guidance.
Backup
Understand incremental scanning, change detection, and the copy workflow.
API Reference
Explore the full
window.kopiaAPI IPC surface and the lib/core.js module.What Kopia Desk does
Kopia Desk scans your chosen source folders, compares every file against the last saved manifest, and presents you with a categorized list of new, changed, and deleted files. You decide which categories to accept, then Kopia Desk copies only those files to<drive>\KopiaDesk_Backup\<folder>\ on your external drive.
Incremental
Only new and changed files are copied. A quick header+tail hash avoids re-copying files that only changed their timestamp.
Smart concurrency
Copy parallelism adapts automatically to the destination drive type — higher for SSDs, lower for spinning HDDs.
Deduplication
Identical files across folders are stored once and linked via NTFS hardlinks, saving space on the backup drive.
Versioning
Before overwriting a changed file in the backup, the previous version is compressed with gzip and saved to
.kopia-data/versions/.Crash recovery
An append-only journal records each file as it is copied. If the app or drive disconnects mid-backup, partial files are detected and cleaned up on the next run.
Restore
Two restore modes: compare your PC against the backup and recover only missing files, or restore an entire folder to any location from scratch.
Get started
Install prerequisites
Make sure you have Node.js ≥ 20 and npm installed on Windows. Then clone the repository and install dependencies.
Add a source folder
Click + Añadir carpeta in the sidebar, or use one of the quick-access buttons (Pictures, Documents, Downloads, Music, Videos, Desktop) to add a source folder with a single click.
Select a destination drive
Choose an external drive or USB stick from the Destino dropdown. Kopia Desk lists all connected drives with available space via PowerShell.
Kopia Desk is a Windows-only application. The drive detection and hidden-folder features rely on PowerShell and NTFS-specific APIs.