Tracking system and app tweaks

I sometimes tweak my system and apps to personalize them further, as time goes by.

As I make a fortnightly image backup, when I occasionally reinstall it (as I am doing now, two generations ago = 1 month) I find that I am missing some tweaks etc.

How do you keep track of the changes you make, apart from writing them down?

thanks for your contribution

 

I use a spreadsheet that is kept on different partition from the operating system. It has two columns: date, and description of change.

 

i write the changes down, then reload the last image, apply the changes and save the image.

i do that once-twice a week.

 

I don't track tweaks, per se, but I do track changes using a simple script. The script produces three text files, one listing installed software, one startup entries, and one file associations. The script maintains two such sets: current and previous, and fires up a comparator so I can check what has changed since the script was last run. Whenever I find myself having to restore an image, I can compare these inventory files to determine what has changed since the image was created.

There is really nothing slick about the script. It just fires up utilities (AutoRuns, for example) that produce the information in a useful and exportable text form.

 

to keep things as simple as possible i use portaple apps as much as i can.

i think out of the 30 programs i have 25 are portable.