Recovery Vault and Restore Center - UniClean Documentation

The Recovery Vault is where UniClean puts everything it removes. Nothing is hard-deleted on the first action: items are archived, the archive is verified, and only then are the originals removed. Restore Center is the screen where you bring items back.

01RemoveYou confirm a plan

Encrypted vaultAES-256-GCM, checked before the original is removed

03RestoreOne click in Restore Center

Items are kept 30 days by default (High Risk items 90 days). You can change both periods in Settings.

How the Recovery Vault fits around a removal. Restore depends on the item type and on the vault copy still existing.

How the vault protects an item

Each item is archived as a tar, hashed with SHA-256, compressed with zstd and encrypted with AES-256-GCM in 1 MiB authenticated chunks.
After writing, UniClean decrypts and decompresses the whole archive and compares the hash and length. If anything differs, the original is never removed.
Before a restore, the archive is verified again, so a damaged vault file is never half-extracted over real files.
Only what was archived is removed: a file is deleted only if its size and modification time still match the archived copy, and folders are removed only when empty.

Where the vault is stored

The vault lives in %LOCALAPPDATA%\UniClean\vault, outside the application folder, so it survives an update, a reinstall or an uninstall of UniClean itself. In portable mode it lives in UniCleanData\vault next to the executable. The encryption key is a random 256-bit key stored in vault.key and, on Windows, wrapped with DPAPI so it is bound to your Windows user account.

Retention

Setting	Default	Range
Safe and Caution items	30 days	1 to 3650 days
High Risk items	90 days	7 to 3650 days
Warning before purge	3 days	1 to 30 days
Auto-purge expired items	On	On or off

An hourly housekeeping check purges expired items and shows a notification before it does. You can extend an item's retention or delete it now from Restore Center.

Restore Center

Restore Center lets you search the vault, see the original path, date, tier and size of each item, restore it with one click, delete it for good, or extend its retention. For files, a restore can rename, overwrite, skip or merge when something already exists at the original path.

What can and cannot be restored

Item	How it is restored	Limit
Files and folders	Extracted back to the original path	Items past retention or deleted from the vault are gone
Registry keys and values	Imported back	Applies only to what was archived
Scheduled tasks	Recreated from the saved task XML	The program they ran must still exist
Services and drivers	Restored as configuration and package	Windows must restart before they start again
Microsoft Store apps	UniClean opens the Store page to reinstall	Cannot be archived byte-for-byte; Windows removes the app data
MSI programs	Files and registry return	The Windows Installer cache may be gone; reinstall the program over itself to repair it

No guarantee

A restore puts archived items back; it cannot promise that a program behaves exactly as before. Deleting an item from the vault, or letting it expire, makes it unrecoverable.

If UniClean stops mid-operation

Vault items are created as pending. On the next start, pending items whose originals are all still present are discarded. If something was already removed, the item is finalised and kept with a note. The database runs in WAL mode with full synchronous writes and archives are flushed to disk before verification.

Use at your own risk

Removing software can break other programs or leave a PC unprotected. Back up important data and create a Windows restore point first. UniClean is Beta software: only its everyday (Safe tier) uninstall and restore flow has been tested by its developer, so treat its advanced features as advanced and read every confirmation.