U3 Snapshot Utility

Now you can determine the types of changes your application makes to a host machine as part of its installation or execution. This is a critical step in the process of creating a mobile application since no changes, other than those approved of by the user, should be made to the host system.

To effectively use this utility, it is important to start your testing process on a machine that has not previously run the application you are testing. This is important so you can check that the host registry is essentially unchanged when installing and running the application.

After installing and running the application, you can use the files generated by before.bat and after.bat to compare the before and after file system and registry statuses. Acceptable changes to the registry are described in Answer ID 79 in the Knowledge Base, and the U3 SDK documentation. Acceptable changes to the file system are confined to files the user has explicitly chosen to save to the host machine in the course of the program run-time.

To use this utility, download the zip file and unzip it.

Then:

• Use before.bat to obtain the directory and registry settings of the test machine.
• Install the application and run it.
• Use after.bat to obtain the directory and registry settings of the test machine.
• WinMerge will start automatically so you can compare the files in the before directory with the after directory.
• Use the WinMerge manual, if necessary, for help.