Three ways back
1. You know what broke — the Fix page
If one specific thing stopped working, repair that one thing. The Fix page has a card per symptom; search what you are seeing — "sound", "printer", "search" — and press the card's button.
Each card writes the Windows default unconditionally. It does not read a backup, which means it also repairs a machine that some other tool changed, and it works even if w0a's own backup file is gone.
It also tells you what it did: "Fixed — 3 setting(s) put back to the Windows default." or "Nothing to fix — this was already at the Windows default." The second answer is real information: whatever is wrong, it is not this.
2. You want a whole change undone — Backups & Restore
The pages that change Windows settings in a group write a checkpoint before they run — system optimization, the CS2 profile, USB priority, internet settings, log cleanup, the Regedit Tweaks page and removing an application. The GPU tuner is the exception: it writes driver values rather than Windows settings, and Reset is its undo. A Fix card records what it changed so it can still be reverted, but it does not open a checkpoint of its own. Backups & Restore lists them, and restoring one puts back everything applied after it — that checkpoint's own changes and every later checkpoint as well. The confirmation says so before it starts. That is the honest behaviour rather than a limitation: what was applied after a point is what sits on top of it, so putting the machine back to that point means undoing those too.
This is the right choice when a session of changes went wrong and you want that session reversed rather than a specific symptom fixed.
3. You want all of it gone — restore everything, then uninstall
Restore every checkpoint, then uninstall. In that order: uninstalling first leaves the settings in place, because they are Windows settings and not w0a's files.
Where the undo log lives
%ProgramData%\w0a\backup.json — outside your user profile on purpose, so it survives a profile rebuild, and written by the elevated part of the application. That is also why w0a will only write to registry paths on its own allow-list: the list is what makes the way back trustworthy, not the writing.
Related
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