Hello and welcome back.
In this lesson, I will show you how to create snapshots.
This is Oracle VirtualBox.
As you can see,
in the previous earlier lesson, I have shown you how to install Kali Linux, and if you click on Kali
Linux virtual machine, you will see that over here there is a list of all the snapshots.
Snapshots are a record of the current or previous state of the virtual machine.
If I select an earlier virtual machine, for example, Windows 7, you will see that I have a list of
snapshots.
If I wanted to revert back to an earlier state, I could easily select the snapshot that I want and
then click on Restore.
And then it will ask me to confirm if I want to restore.
If I wanted to restore, I would then uncheck this box and click on the button Restore.
After that, it will then undo all these other later states and go back to the state of the virtual
machine
as of this snapshot.
So this is very useful because sometimes when you are doing reverse engineering,
you might want to undo any changes that have been made to your operating system in the virtual machine.
Sometimes a tool or a program which you install might alter or make changes to your operating system.
For example, it might modify your registry settings or create other files in unknown locations.
So the easiest way to undo all those changes is simply to revert back to an earlier snapshot.
This is especially useful when you are trying to learn reverse engineering
and want to undo changes made by the software.
It is also useful
in malware analysis when you are trying to analyze a software which you suspect might be a virus or
some Trojan,
so, or even ransomware.
So in order to undo the damage done by the virus, you can easily revert to an earlier snapshot.
So how do you create a snapshot?
We are going to try on our Kali Linux virtual machine.
The first step is to select the virtual machine.
And then over here on the toolbar, you will see an icon, a button called Take.
If you hover your mouse over it, you will see
the text,
Take a Snapshot.
So all you need to do is just click on it.
Then it will ask you for a name for your snapshot.
So we can give it a name.
We can give it a date, even if you prefer to call it by date.
So I can call it 2021 March 7th, today's date, and I can put in some description if I wanted to.
And if I didn't want, I can just leave it empty and then click
Okay.
And now it has created the snapshot.
I can then start my virtual machine.
I will now log in using kali as a login name and kali as the password and hit Login.
I will now go into full screen mode by clicking on View and selecting Full Screen Mode.
And then I will click on the Switch button.
I will now demonstrate how to
create a file
and then undo it by reverting to the earlier snapshot.
So I will now right-click here,
and then
create a folder right on the desktop and call it test and click Create.
And now I have a new folder on the desktop.
Open the folder
by double-clicking it.
And inside this folder,
I will create a document,
an empty file,
call it test file
.txt.
So now I'm going to undo this by reverting back to the earliest snapshot.
So to do that, I will now shut down this Kali machine.
First, I will restore it to its windowed mode by hovering my mouse at the bottom so that the toolbar
will pop up and then selecting on the window restore to go back to windowed mode.
And now I will shut down Kali by clicking this button on the top right corner and hitting Shut Down.
Now my Kali machine has shut down.
So as you can see, when I select on the machine, I can see that the current state has changed.
So if I wanted to undo this change, all I need to do is select the previous state,
and then hit the Restore button on the top.
It will ask me to confirm.
So I will uncheck this box and click on the Restore button.
And now you will notice that the current state has updated to the 2021 March 7th current state.
So I can now restart my Kali machine and check it out.
Okay.
My Kali machine has fully booted up.
You will now notice that the folder which I created earlier is gone.
So this is how you can use snapshots.
So use it often when you are reversing software.
So that is all for this video.
Thank you for watching.