You can back up just about every aspect of your computing life, but what about the positioning and layout of your desktop icons? If you have everything neatly laid out exactly the way you want it, it can be frustrating finding that the layout has changed. This typically occurs when temporarily lowering the desktop resolution (such as when entering Safe mode).

If this behaviour irks you, or you want to be able to switch between different layouts (perhaps you share your computer with a friend who has a nasty habit of moving desktops around the screen), then the answer to your problem lies with a handy little freeware tool called DesktopOK.

Once downloaded and extracted, DesktopOK functions as a portable application, so you can easily run it from any folder or even a USB thumb drive. It’s capable of storing up to 32 different layouts – either by clicking the Save button or by configuring it to run at a set intervals. These options can be tweaked from the program’s Options > Auto-Save menu: the default choices will be fine for most, as it checks every hour and backs up the layout if it’s changed in any way. Only the last four backups are kept by default, but this figure can be extended to 16 or 32.

Restoring the desktop layout is simple too, and you can easily switch between different layouts too. Remove unwanted backups by selecting them and clicking Delete, or click the ab button to rename them to something more memorable.

There’s even a fun – if pretty impractical – option to “Punch the icons”, which places them all randomly on-screen. Don’t worry, the current layout is backed up prior to this happening, making it easy to switch back again.

If you never change desktop resolution you might wonder if there’s any real point to DesktopOK, but seeing as the backup file is only a couple of KB in size, what have you got to lose? The next time you’re forced into Safe mode and back out again, you might just thank your lucky stars you had DesktopOK on tap.

DesktopOK is freeware and available for Windows in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.