how to uninstall new "Windows Backup" bloat app?

antspants · Sep 24, 2023

Edwin said:
Yeah, probably! Maybe a waste of time!

Wonder if he ran that command in a Powershell Admin?

Ask him again next month when he has to do it again

We need a reddit link

Edwin · Sep 24, 2023

antspants said:
We need a reddit link

The reddit post is the link, just click on it.

antspants · Sep 24, 2023

Edwin said:
The reddit post is the link, just click on it.

Good on me…
I’m wearing my nub hat today…

antspants · Sep 24, 2023

I can’t stand reddit. But from what I can gather, some are trying to restore that package lol

Edwin · Sep 24, 2023

antspants said:
I can’t stand reddit. But from what I can gather, some are trying to restore that package lol

Yeah, if you read all the comments, it buggers up a lot of stuff!

antspants · Sep 24, 2023

Edwin said:
Yeah, if you read all the comments, it buggers up a lot of stuff!

Mission aborted.
Companies these days don’t screw around. These results are quite purposeful and basically makes it impossible to remove one thing without losing something of value. Clever tactics by design.

Edwin · Sep 24, 2023

antspants said:
Mission aborted.

Good call!

antspants said:
Clever tactics by design.

Exactly!

antspants · Sep 24, 2023

Edwin said:
Good call!

Exactly!

It reminds me of opting out of specific adds or suggestions with Windows. ‘OK you opted out, so we are going to throw random crap at you‘ There is no off.

Berton · Sep 24, 2023

I have Windows backup on my Pro desktop but so far it has not removed the old Backup and Restore (Windows 7) in Control Panel.

antspants · Sep 24, 2023

Berton said:
I have Windows backup on my Pro desktop but so far it has not removed the old Backup and Restore (Windows 7) in Control Panel.

I have to be honest, as someone who has never had the problems with Backup & Restore that others have had, I am glad it’s still there.

Pneen · Sep 29, 2023

Windows Backup is just a giant, misleading ad for OneDrive subscriptions. It doesn't add any new features. So many people have mistakenly thought that it was something that could rival macOS's backup functionality - which no, it does not. We're still left backing up things using the Windows 7 tool, using external software, or doing it ourselves. You cannot properly uninstall it as it isn't its own app. It's part of the Microsoft-Windows-UserExperience-Desktop-Package (Windows Feature Experience Pack), which is also responsible for the emoji picker, win+shift+s snipping tool, and more.

bob3d · Nov 15, 2023

So, after all is said and done and after reading 4 pages of posts on getting rid of the Windows Backup entry that haunts me in my Startup menu, no one knows how to delete it.

Am I understanding this correctly?

bob

Fabler2 · Nov 15, 2023

bob3d said:
So, after all is said and done and after reading 4 pages of posts on getting rid of the Windows Backup entry that haunts me in my Startup menu, no one knows how to delete it.

Am I understanding this correctly?

bob

Have a read here.

pparks1 · Nov 15, 2023

Pneen said:
So many people have mistakenly thought that it was something that could rival macOS's backup functionality - which no, it does not.

This has confounded me since the first time I bought a mac and played with Time Machine. Time Machine is not the worlds most feature-rich configurable backup tool on the planet, but it comes by default and it does the exact job that almost everybody wants it to do. It takes backups of files and your system. If you need to recover just a single file, or a folder from a specific time you can do that. If you get a new mac, you can restore your Time Machine backup to it completely.

cereberus · Nov 15, 2023

This tool is more useful than one might think. If you want to a clean install but hate going through some of the initial steps e.g. setting background, moving taskbar to left, set up start menu with key uwp apps etc, this is very easy to do using new backup.

One of Windows 8's useful features was "refresh my pc" (not reset my PC). When you did refresh, it reinstalled OS but kept uwp apps, settings and user data. This feature was ditched in Windows 10 and you have to reinstall all non default uwp apps manually. Also W10 "reset" reinstalls default uwp apps you have uninstalled.

I always thought this was a retrograde step in W10.

I am glad to see that the new backup tool will effectively emulate the old W8 refresh mode.

In effect, I now have a customised clean install template with virtually no effort.

AlphaChad9000 · Mar 14, 2024

Hello tech frens! This is my first post so go easy on me. I'm pretty sure I have found a few ways to get rid of this bloat app.

The first method is removing the app manually, which I assume is leaving behind reg entries but removes the icon from start and the program. If you go to the directory below and type WindowsBackup in the search box. Delete the 5 files and reboot and you should be good to go.

Batch:

C:\Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_cw5n1h2txyewy

The second method is through Remove-WindowsPackage in powershell. The issue with this method is that you have to look up the version of the current local package found on your system. Because this app changes versions every month or so, you have to replace the version number in this code to your current version number after the 2 tildes ~~ in the code. 10.0.19041.4123 is the current version for WIN10 22H2 for the date of this post.

Powershell:
```
dism /online /get-packages
```

Powershell:

Remove-WindowsPackage -Online -PackageName “Microsoft-Windows-UserExperience-Desktop-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.19041.4123”

The third method came from code I actually used to remove the SecHealthUI app dynamically. After investigating the code, I figured out that I just needed the name of the package to remove the program dynamically without having to look up the current version number in method two. When searching through dism the package name came up as "WindowsUserExperience" but that isn't the name of the local package that gets installed for some odd reason. The name of the package locally that gets installed is "ClientCbs". It has a few different little apps in it like snipping tool and I think two others. This is why I mentioned the manual method just incase the other apps in this package is something that you might use. But personally I use third party apps for snipping and the other two I just don't use. Once I found the name of the package, I just switched the code from the "SecHealthUI" to "ClientCbs" and ran it. Turns out. It removes the whole package dynamically regardless of version.

Powershell:

$remove_appx = @("Client.CBS"); $provisioned = get-appxprovisionedpackage -online; $appxpackage = get-appxpackage -allusers; $eol = @()
$store = 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Appx\AppxAllUserStore'
$users = @('S-1-5-18'); if (test-path $store) {$users += $((dir $store -ea 0 |where {$_ -like '*S-1-5-21*'}).PSChildName)}
foreach ($choice in $remove_appx) { if ('' -eq $choice.Trim()) {continue}
  foreach ($appx in $($provisioned |where {$_.PackageName -like "*$choice*"})) {
    $next = !1; foreach ($no in $skip) {if ($appx.PackageName -like "*$no*") {$next = !0}} ; if ($next) {continue}
    $PackageName = $appx.PackageName; $PackageFamilyName = ($appxpackage |where {$_.Name -eq $appx.DisplayName}).PackageFamilyName
    ni "$store\Deprovisioned\$PackageFamilyName" -force >''; $PackageFamilyName
    foreach ($sid in $users) {ni "$store\EndOfLife\$sid\$PackageName" -force >''} ; $eol += $PackageName
    dism /online /set-nonremovableapppolicy /packagefamily:$PackageFamilyName /nonremovable:0 >''
    remove-appxprovisionedpackage -packagename $PackageName -online -allusers >''
  }
  foreach ($appx in $($appxpackage |where {$_.PackageFullName -like "*$choice*"})) {
    $next = !1; foreach ($no in $skip) {if ($appx.PackageFullName -like "*$no*") {$next = !0}} ; if ($next) {continue}
    $PackageFullName = $appx.PackageFullName;
    ni "$store\Deprovisioned\$appx.PackageFamilyName" -force >''; $PackageFullName
    foreach ($sid in $users) {ni "$store\EndOfLife\$sid\$PackageFullName" -force >''} ; $eol += $PackageFullName
    dism /online /set-nonremovableapppolicy /packagefamily:$PackageFamilyName /nonremovable:0 >''
    remove-appxpackage -package $PackageFullName -allusers >''
  }
}

Anyway, One of these I hope works in Windows 11 as well. I have not tested it yet in Windows 11 but most of the time the code works in both. If not, ill check back and then figure out what changes needed to be made here. I also just noticed there is also a TenForums domain as well. Just my luck :)

I attached a powershell script for the dynamic version. Powershell needs to be elevated and set-executionpolicy unrestricted needs to be set as well to run the script.

Ed Tittel · Mar 16, 2024

See my recent blog post: Windows Backup App Handling Disappoints - Ed Tittel. I agree with many/most of the sentiments voiced here. Just wrote a story about WB for ComputerWorld, in which I concluded that it's not robust or standalone enough for me to relinquish daily use of image backup on my production machines, and weeklies on test PCs.
--Ed--