How To Save Start Tiles Windows 8
How To Save and Restore my Windows 8 Start Screen Tile Layout? Organizing Start Screen on Windows 8 machine isn’t difficult but quite tedious. Moving around the tiles, changing the size of it, and pinning or unpinning apps all requires your effort moving your finger or mouse to make it done. The last thing you want is to have to do it all over again if anything happened that have changed the whole layout or have reset it back to the start point.
Is there a way to save the layout of my Windows 8 Start Screen and restore it later on when needed? The answer is a surprisingly simple yes.
Turns out, the information about your Windows 8 Start Screen is all saved in a database in your user profile folder, specifically as below:
%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\appsFolder.itemdata-ms and its backup file:
%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\appsFolder.itemdata-ms.bak
To backup, just simply copy these 2 files to other location, or run a batch file that looks like this:
@Echo Off Copy %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\appsFolder.itemdata-ms %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\GoldappsFolder.itemdata-ms Copy %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\appsFolder.itemdata-ms.bak %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\GoldappsFolder.itemdata-ms.bak echo “Your current Start Menu configuration has been backup up” Pause
To restore, just copy the files back to overwrite the current one, and restart Explorer. Or run a batch file that looks like this:
@ Echo off Del %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\appsFolder.itemdata-ms Del %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\appsFolder.itemdata-ms.bak Copy %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\GoldappsFolder.itemdata-ms %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\appsFolder.itemdata-ms Copy %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\GoldappsFolder.itemdata-ms.bak %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\appsFolder.itemdata-ms.bak
tskill explorer
echo “Your current Start Menu configuration has been restored” Pause
Yes, that’s all you need to do. Replacing these 2 database files will not uninstall your applications, nor does it require admin rights.
Enjoy,
Your ArtIT Team