An AI Agent Wrote Over Her Thesis. So We Built the Safety Net
Why we shipped File Guardian: automatic local version history for people who use AI tools but have never opened a terminal. Free on the Microsoft Store.
The customer we never expected to serve is a designer, not a developer. She runs AI tools every day. She has never opened a terminal in her life. And when an AI assistant rewrote her folder of source files overnight, she had no undo, no git, no file history, no cloud version of anything. Three weeks of work, gone, and she did not even know that recovery was supposed to be possible.
Developers laugh at this scenario. A developer who loses a file has four free answers: git, IDE local history, cloud sync, the recycle bin. That is exactly why we keep failing to sell recovery tools to developers. If your audience can solve the problem themselves, they will not pay you, and they will call your product a scam for charging.
Non-developers have none of those answers. To them, saving over a file is irreversible by default. They find this out the hard way, once.
What we built
File Guardian is a small Windows app that watches one folder you choose and quietly records every save. When something goes wrong, you open a timeline, compare any older version against your current file line by line, and restore with one click. The whole folder can roll back to a snapshot too, which matters when an agent touches forty files in one pass.
Three design decisions came from watching the wrong people use the right software:
No account. Nothing leaves the machine. The fear that drives this purchase is losing files. A tool that uploads those files to our cloud to protect them fails the smell test, and it is a second place for them to leak. So there is no sign-up, no telemetry, no sync. Everything is on your disk.
One folder to point at. Products that ask you to configure include paths, retention rules and schedules lose this customer at step two. Default everything, expose one choice. Advanced users can miss the knobs; everyone else just needs it to already work.
Generous free, single-price pro. The free version protects one folder with subfolders, keeps about a gigabyte of history for ninety days, covers twelve common file types, and gives you the full restore, diff and snapshot machinery. It is not a trial with nag screens. Pro is $19.9 once: unlimited history, versions kept forever, every file type. No subscription. Someone who lost a thesis will pay, but only once, and only to a price that does not feel like a trap.
The honest limits
It is Windows only, and text-like files are where it shines: markdown, code, documents, spreadsheets, images and other binaries are versioned but you cannot diff them line by line. A folder under heavy machine load will burn some disk on history. The free tier’s ninety-day window means a very old mistake is still a mistake. We would rather say this on the store page than collect one-star reviews for it later.
Get it
File Guardian is free to install from the Microsoft Store, and Pro unlocks as a one-time in-app purchase. Microsoft signs and auto-updates the package, so an install stays current without you touching anything.
If you are the person in your family who gets asked to fix the computer, there is a decent chance the next file disaster you hear about comes from an AI assistant that was told to “just tidy this up.” Point File Guardian at the folder before the tidy-up. It costs nothing to be the one who never loses anything.
Made by our CodingGroup label in Huizhou, China. Questions go to our contact page and reach a human.