A backup is only as good as the restore that follows it. In BackupKit, restore is a first-class workflow, not an afterthought: pick a backup, pick a version, pick where it lands — no terminal, no manual unzipping, no hunting through archives.
Three clicks, no terminal
Open the job you want to recover. Each job keeps its own restore history.
Yesterday's backup? A snapshot from three months ago? Every run is listed with size, date, and status.
BackupKit pulls the archive, decrypts it with your password, and drops the files where you asked.
Every backup is a rewind button
Ransomware that was silently encrypting files for two weeks. A bad deploy that trashed a project folder. An accidental "delete all" on Tuesday you only noticed on Friday. Pick the version from before things went wrong.
- Browse every run of every job, sorted by date.
- See size, duration, and success status at a glance.
- Retention policy decides how far back you can go — configurable per job.
Checked before the day you need it
A restore point is only worth something if the files are really in it. Every backup writes a list of what it holds, a small .manifest.json next to the backup, and the moment a run finishes BackupKit checks the destination against that list. A run can't report success when nothing arrived.
- Verify, whenever you like: re-check a backup's latest run. A plain backup is checked file by file; for a compressed or encrypted one BackupKit reads the archive's index without downloading it, and a full check reads every file back with your password.
- Restore warns you when the backup you picked didn't finish, or has never been verified.
- Restored files arrive whole: a file that can't be fetched completely fails with a message, instead of landing cut short.
Restore wherever makes sense
A restore isn't always "back to where it came from." Sometimes you want a side-by-side copy; sometimes you're moving to a new PC.
- Original location: the default. Overwrites the files exactly where they were backed up from.
- Custom folder: any folder on your PC, useful for comparing against the live version before overwriting.
- A new machine: install BackupKit on the new PC, connect the same storage, and point a new backup at the folder that holds your backups. BackupKit adopts their history, and you restore from it straight away. Disaster recovery, sorted.
If BackupKit ever vanished, your data wouldn't
Backups live or die by one question: can you actually read them in ten years? BackupKit stores everything as a standard zip — not a proprietary format, not a database, not something only our app can open.
7-Zip, WinRAR, PeaZip, The Unarchiver, Keka — any modern archive tool can open a BackupKit archive and decrypt it with your password. No BackupKit install required.
Open the archive and you see your actual folder tree — not a blob, not a delta chain. Pull out a single file if that's all you need.
And nobody has to remember any of this: a plain-text HOW-TO-RESTORE.txt in your backup folder explains how to get your files back with 7-Zip and your password, or with BackupKit on a new PC.
Read more about the archive format on the encryption page.
Two ways to get your files back
BackupKit restores a backup in full: pick the version, pick where it lands, and the whole thing comes back. There is no in-app file picker — worth knowing before the day you need it. When you only want one document, the archive format is the answer, and it is why the format matters.
- Restore from BackupKit: the whole backup, back on disk. For machine replacement, a clean reinstall, or simply getting everything back where it was.
- Open the archive yourself: download it straight from your storage (Drive, FTP, your NAS...) and open it with any zip tool. The folder tree is right there — take the one file you came for and leave the rest. No BackupKit install required.
Back up anything, anywhere — today
Encrypted, scheduled, automated backups to storage you already own. Try every feature free for 30 days — no card required.