Tool to save all application/windows settings

Often times the easiest solution to solve weird software issues is just reinstalling windows, but that comes with the hassle of having to setup everything, forgetting something and then having to change it again later on.

It would be nice if there is a tool that makes a snapshot of a windows installation and looks for applications/games and saves the specific settings and savegames.
It could work in a way that you can make profiles a bit like authotkey and can download community profiles for the applications on your system.

A profile can be an xml/yaml with the information in it like:

  • Satisfactory
    Savegames: %AppData%\Local\FactoryGame\Saved\SaveGames
  • EVGA Precision X1
    C:\Program Files (x86)\EVGA\Precision XOC\Profiles
  • Random software
    List of registry settings and their corresponding settings.
  • Visual studio code
    etc.

I don’t often reinstall my computer, but i do often setup computers for colleagues and it is really annoying to setup the same IP address and folder location or opening the program to change the setting of 1 folder.

I would like to also add some other information like it saving a list of all the installed applications and also saving all the settings in windows
(I’m not sure if it is feasable to set those back, but having a list of 15 things to set and knowing i have the same setup is something i much prefer over finding out that for example the voice setting sets my application volume to 25% while loading in a game.)

Is there maybe a tool like this? I don’t think i’m the only one annoyed by the setup.

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I share your pain which is why I started to try and find true portable version of programs I use.
I say true portable version with meaning, as there are some “portable” programs that still use the registry to store settings which is not portable at all when you want to transfer just one folder and every setting is preserved, like a .ini file would do for example.
Some programs actually have such a mode but you need to manually activate it, like Filazilla.

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