I just had this idea, but I am not sure how to phrase it.

I imagine a PC with one hard drive. three partitions.

partition 1, whatever OS installation you want.
partition 2, a 'snapshot' partition
partition 3, data/storage/etc

So, you create partition 1, and now, not only can you ghost it, but while it is in use, all changes to it are actually made in the 'snapshot' partition, which means at the end of testing/working on it, to clean the slate, you'd just restart or some other similar nearly instant step. or you could save the state and pick a different snapshot to work from.

Does something like this exist?

will von wizzlepig wrote on Nov 15^th, 2010 at 3:03pm:


If you have XP or Vista, perhaps you might be interested in Microsoft's free SteadyState for that kind of purpose:

http://microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess

SteadyState was intended for public kiosks and computer labs, where it was desirable to revert to a consistent startup state at each boot.  When a system with SteadyState is booted, the system appears to operate normally except all changes are cached in a separate location.  When you shutdown or reboot, the changes are flushed so the system boots exactly like it did in the previous session.  When shutting down there is an override option if an administrator prefers to save the changes or update the baseline state.

SteadyState was available for XP and Vista, but will not be updated for Win7.  MS will be pulling the download link at the end of next month, so if anyone thinks he/she might want to try it out at some point in the future, you'd better download it now and save it.

SteadyState is the way to go when the norm at every boot will be reverting to a consistent C: state and keeping system changes will be the exception.  Partition images or snapshots are the way to go when the norm is to keep the changes and the exception is reverting to a baseline when things get messed up.

Keep in mind that SteadyState only monitors the "System" partition, so if you need to keep something you would simply move it to another partition before SteadyState flushes the changes.  I don't use SteadyState, but when I tried it I found it more convenient to move the users' "Favorites" and "My Documents" folders to another partition.