This guide walks you through your first backup with Kopia Desk — from launching the app to watching the progress bar finish. The entire flow takes about five minutes the first time, and less than one minute on subsequent runs when only a few files have changed. Connect your external drive or USB stick before you begin.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.
On the very first backup of a folder, no manifest exists yet, so Kopia Desk treats every file as new and copies all of them. Subsequent runs compare against that saved manifest and copy only what has changed.
Running Your First Backup
Launch the app
Open PowerShell in the project directory and start Kopia Desk:The main window opens at 1300 × 820 px. The top bar shows three counters — folders added, changes detected, and files copied — alongside the theme toggle; the sidebar on the left contains all controls.
Add a source folder
Tell Kopia Desk which folder to back up. You have two options:Quick-access buttons — Kopia Desk automatically detects which of the standard Windows user folders exist on your PC and shows a button for each one. Click any button to add it instantly.
Custom folder dialog — Click + Añadir carpeta to open a native Windows folder picker and choose any directory.You can add multiple source folders; each one is backed up and tracked independently. If two different source paths share the same folder name (for example
| Button label | Windows folder |
|---|---|
| Imágenes | Pictures |
| Documentos | Documents |
| Descargas | Downloads |
| Música | Music |
| Videos | Videos |
| Escritorio | Desktop |
C:\ProjectA\Backup and D:\ProjectB\Backup), Kopia Desk automatically disambiguates the second one by appending the parent folder name or a numeric suffix, so their manifests and backup directories never collide.Select a destination drive
Open the destination dropdown in the sidebar. Kopia Desk queries PowerShell (
Get-Volume) and lists every connected drive with its label and available free space. Select the external drive or USB stick where you want to store the backup.Backup files are written to <drive>\KopiaDesk_Backup\<folder-name>\. A hidden .kopia-data\ directory on the same drive holds manifests, version history, the operation journal, and logs.Review backup options
The sidebar exposes four toggles. Hover over any option label for a tooltip that explains what it does.
| Option | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Versioning | On | Before overwriting a changed file in the backup, saves the previous version compressed with gzip in .kopia-data\versions\<date>\ |
| Deep hash | Off | Computes a full SHA-256 over every file instead of the fast header+tail hash |
| Deduplication | Off | Creates NTFS hardlinks for files whose content already exists in the backup, avoiding duplicate storage |
| Show technical details | Off | Reveals disk type (SSD/HDD/USB) and the concurrency value being used for this run |
Scan for changes
Click Escanear cambios. Kopia Desk recursively walks every source folder, skipping files and directories that match the exclusion patterns:A progress bar tracks the scan phase. For each source folder, Kopia Desk then loads the saved manifest (if one exists) and classifies every file into one of three categories:
- New — present in the scan, absent from the manifest
- Changed — present in both, but size or modification time differ (and hash confirms a real change)
- Deleted — present in the manifest, absent from the scan (the file was removed from your PC)
Review the changes panel
After scanning, each source folder appears as a card in the main panel showing three counts with colour-coded badges: new files, changed files, and deleted files.For each category on each folder card you can choose to accept (include in the upcoming copy) or skip (leave as-is). Hover over the “deleted” badge for a reminder that deleted files are only removed from the manifest — the copy in the backup is always preserved.
Verify free space
The sidebar shows a live free-space indicator for the selected drive. If the total size of accepted files exceeds the available space, a warning appears showing exactly how much additional space is needed, and the copy button is disabled until enough space is freed — either by ejecting and swapping to a larger drive, or by deselecting some categories.
Start the backup
Click Copiar aceptados. Kopia Desk:
- Opens a JSONL journal for crash recovery
- Detects the drive type via PowerShell and picks the optimal concurrency (e.g. up to 8 parallel writes on NVMe SSD for small files, 1–2 on a spinning HDD)
- If versioning is on, compresses and saves the previous version of each changed file before overwriting
- Copies new and changed files, creating hardlinks for any content already in the deduplication index
- Emits a progress event after every file
Monitor progress
The progress bar at the bottom of the window updates after every file. It shows:
- Phase —
backupduring the copy,restoreorrestore-scanduring a restore operation - Percent complete — calculated as
(files copied / total files) × 100 - Current file — the relative path of the file being written right now
Confirm the log entry
When the copy finishes, the journal file is deleted (no incomplete run to clean up) and a log entry appears in the log panel at the bottom of the window. The entry is also persisted as a JSON file in
.kopia-data\logs\ on the destination drive, named <folder>_<timestamp>.json.The manifest for each backed-up folder is updated on the drive, so the next scan will use today’s state as its baseline.After Your First Backup
Once the backup is complete, two additional tabs become useful.Compare tab — find and restore missing files
Compare tab — find and restore missing files
The Compare tab lets you check whether files in your backup are still present on your PC without restoring everything. Select which backed-up folders to check and which local folder to compare against, then start the comparison.Kopia Desk reports two lists:
- Missing from PC — files in the backup manifest that no longer exist in the local folder. You can restore any or all of them individually.
- Lost from backup — files the manifest says were backed up but that are no longer present on the destination drive (e.g. deleted manually or lost to drive damage). Removing these from the manifest lets the next backup re-copy them.
Restore tab — full folder restore to any location
Restore tab — full folder restore to any location
The Restore tab copies the complete contents of a backup folder to any directory you choose, without needing a local copy to compare against. This is the right tool when the original PC profile no longer exists — for example, after a Windows reinstall or when setting up a replacement machine with a different user account.Select the backup folder from the list, choose a destination directory via the native folder picker, and click restore. Progress is tracked file-by-file with the same progress bar used during backup.