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Good Freeware System Snapshot Tool For Windows?
Khyber writes "I'm doing a little personal research into a project that tracks what changes get made to your system every time you install a program. I know there are ways of checking through Windows Restore Points, but that's not what I'm trying to do. Instead, I'm going to start with an absolutely fresh Windows XP install, take a full snapshot of the entire installation on the hard drive, and burn that to a DVD (somewhat like a backup disc with an entire snapshot of my hard drive's current contents.) With every program I install, I'm going to take another snapshot, burn to DVD, and repeat the process until I have recreated every step taken to get to my current system state (all programs installed on a separate hard drive, all registry entries etc on the OS drive, with only snapshots of the OS drive being recorded.) The purpose for all of this I'm not legally allowed to talk about, due to confidentiality requirements. Does anybody know of such a program, preferably freeware, that will accomplish my objective, and are there tools that can be used to compare the difference in drive images?"
Wow, quiet in here.
FOG, aka Free Open Ghosting, at www.fogproject.org, will certainly take images of your hard drives; that's not a problem.
And, I haven't played with it, but it has the capability to do install packages, so that meets the bit-by-bit portion of things.
Like most open-source packages, FOG improves constantly, and recently, it's getting better by leaps and bounds.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
What you're aiming to do is perfectly valid but the method you describe in order to achieve your goal is horribly inefficient; I'd be hard pushed to think of a more time-consuming and difficult way to achieve your goal. My tip:
This sounds like an absolutely ideal scenario where you could benefit from virtualisation technology. Install the system you wish to "monitor" in a virtual machine. I come from the VMware world, and I can say that the snapshots feature of VMware Workstation would do exactly what it sounds like you want. Whenever you wish to capture an image of the present state of the machine, take a snapshot. Further, you can take as many snapshots as you please, these snapshots can be built on previous snapshots, and you can even have branching snapshots. Icing on the cake: only the differences since the last snapshot will be saved, so you'll save a huge amount of data versus burning complete snapshots to DVD.
What next? Simple, mount the snapshots as a drive on the host machine and diff them using the tool of your choice. I use WinDiff for basic directory/file comparison, but there's a multitude of options out there. The only problem I can imagine would be you probably can't mount multiple snapshots simultaneously from the same virtual disk, but you could get around this by just making a copy of the VHD on your HD and mounting the second snapshot off that.
By the way, there's likely other virtualisation products out there (e.g. VirtualBox) that can achieve what I described above, I'm purely using VMware Workstation as an example as it's my virtualiser of choice. Further, VMware Workstation is not free, VBox is.