How can I compare two VirtualBox snapshots?

Question

I'm using Oracle VM VirtualBox on Windows to run Windows.

I'd like to take a snapshot, perform an action, take another snapshot and then compare the two snapshots to see what effect (disk changes) the action had.

Suggestions on how to achieve the same thing with another technique are welcome.

Answer 1

Mount each VDI as a logical drive on the host. Use a folder comparison tool like Beyond Compare to compare each logical drive.

Answer 2

I have not tried this and it would take much effort to test it out, so I'll just let you know what I'm thinking. I use Linux almost entirely here.

A tool such as this or other checksum tool can checksum every file on your VM filesystem's snapshots.

http://md5deep.sourceforge.net/

Apparently certUtil is built into Windows and can do checksums too. md5 might be a little slow - it may be worth while looking into finding the fastest checksum tool/algorithm for your OS. You can completely skip doing checksums if you don't care whether or not a file has changed.

I'm sure there would be a little work on your part (making a batch file) but the idea is:

On each snapshot

1. Get a list of every file/directory
2. Checksum each file
3. Save all gathered info to a file

Afterwards, compare the two files with diff (GNU) or FC (Windows), etc... to see what files were added, removed, moved or changed.

That's my 2 cents. Here's someone else's that might help, I'm not sure.

https://improvingsoftware.com/2013/09/09/how-to-diff-two-folders-from-a-windows-command-prompt/

It references RoboCopy for creating diffs and Beyond Compare