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?"

Comments

FOG might do it.

[millia]

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.

Re:FOG might do it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Norton Ghost is fairly cheap and Ghost Explorer will allow you to "browse" the images. I'm not entirely sure on the comparisons angle.

Trying to make an "alternative system rollback/savestate" program are we?

First, Ghost sucks. Not version 8, which was awesome, but the recent versions, which won't let you run ghost off the damn CD you paid for. No, you have to find an old copy and put that on a USB or other HD to run it from. B-tards.

This guy isn't trying to make his own ghost, he's trying to clone registry keys and serial numbers so he can push a software install. So he's tryign to clone Installshield, but in a way that magically provides great MSI compatibility to installers that don't already have MSI functionality.

AKA the windows tech pipe dream. And I say this after my last post was called an anti-apple troll because I suggested a $299 emachine laptop was "good enough" for most people vs a $1500 macbook :p

Oh and thanks to OP for the FOG link. Hadn't heard of it.

Captcha: atheism - the practice of not believing Steve jobs is God

Take that mods :)

I could tell you...

[MikeV]

...but then I'd have to kill you. You know, confidentiality agreements and whatnot...

Re:DIY

[tomhudson]

Instead of just making a copy after each install, make your copy after you install a program, then copy the original "clean" image back to the drive. Otherwise, you'll never know if a second program would have installed some files that the first program already installed.

Xen?

[SanLouBlues]

Sounds like a virtual environment is exactly what you need.

Why?

[ledow]

Personally, I use Ghost for imaging and if I want to find out what a program is doing, I run sysinternals File Monitor and Registry Monitor. They're real-time and don't record in a nice format but nothing really beats them on Windows. They've helped me diagnose hundreds of horrible modern and ancient installation programs used in an educational environment to allow network installation (why, exactly, do you need write access to C:\WINDOWS to run a Shockwave-based game for toddlers, etc.?).

Linux/Unix has this much easier because it allows you to monitor EVERYTHING without massive binary blobs having settings stored in them, having settings locked to particular machines, etc. or things generally getting in your way. Windows, it's a pain in the proverbial.

Even a lot of the professional MSI-Builders with their "discovery" modes are absolutely useless at working out what was actually a vital change and what was just the installer playing about, or the user changing their screensaver / explorer view preferences while they installed etc. I spend half my life cleaning MSI's of unnecessary cruft and inserting the entries that they miss. About 50% of automated install captures like this are useless for deployment to a different machine.

Basically, despite the "secrecy" around your particular purpose (why did you have to mention that at all... it makes no difference to what you want and adds nothing to our knowledge), it's probably not worth the hassle. Before and after snapshots, or package the programs and MSI's and you'll find out everything you need along the way, with an actual, practical result at the end. Trying to diff a filesystem/registry image in any way is madness and is only useful if you can get a *perfectly* clean machine, a VERY good automated program to do it brilliantly, where you'll end up with a lot of cruft that isn't related to the program installation at all (e.g. event log entries, temporary files, taskbar icons saving their settings etc.).

Horribly Inefficient

[Ralish]

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.

Re:Duh!

[L4t3r4lu5]

1. Download Linux Live CD (700mb).
2. Boot to Linux Live CD. Find out your hardware isn't supported as MoBo is new.
3. Download different Live CD.
4. Repeat 2 and 3.
5. Find Live CD which allows you to boot X. You're not a console monkey, so you need a GUI.
6a. Wireless network doesn't work "out of the box." Find / make 30m patch lead to go from back of PC downstairs to your router. Download NDISWrapper and firmware. Configure wireless networking. Alternatively;
6b. Look online for help using dd and sdiff, as you've never, ever heard of these applications.
7. Read three different forums full of "OMG go bk 2 winbl0wz, n00b!11" posts regarding the same issue until you find one person who has managed to pry the information you need out of somebody with a small sense of community.
8. Take image of Windows partition. Make coffee while you wait.

Total time to complete, with downloading images: 9 hours 40 minutes.

Total time to reinstall Windows XP, patch, and install games: 5 hours.

THAT'S how tough it is. We're not all Linux users.