Hierarchical Sandboxes

[Xyem]

If this is what is meant by "Merge sandboxes into the entire system 'on the fly'" or "Layers", I apologise. To me I believe that this isn't the same as either of those.. please correct me if I am wrong!

Is it possible ( or could it be added in as a feature ) to be able to have hierarchical sandboxes?

For example, say I wanted to test an addon for Firefox like CookieSwap and look at the differences between Firefox 2 and 3 and add-on versions 1.2 and 1.3.

I would like to have two sandboxes, one for Firefox 2 and one for Firefox 3. Then "under" each sandbox, have two more, one for 1.2 and 1.3.

The sub-sandboxes would use the data in their 'parent' sandbox but write changes to their own. This would allow me to run 4 instances of Firefox with 4 variants at the same time and with minimal installation of applications. If I then wanted to try 1.4 I could just create another sandbox under the two parent ones..

SB1: Firefox 2 install
* SB3: CookieSwap 1.2 install
* SB4: CookieSwap 1.3 install
SB2: Firefox 3 install
* SB5: CookieSwap 1.2 install
* SB6: CookieSwap 1.3 install[/i]

[tzuk]

This isn't what is meant by the "layers" mentioned in common feature request. But a request for sandbox-within-a-sandbox was also made in the past -- just not frequently enough to be mentioned there.

As for the request itself, this would be a drastic change that would touch almost every aspect of Sandboxie, so it is not likely that I will undertake such a project.

If it helps, you can easily duplicate sandboxes by copying the sandbox folder. Copying/restoring the folder can also offer some snapshot/rollback functionality. I understand this is not really what you asked for, but it may save you some time re-installing software into the sandbox.

[Guest]

A bit of a shame because I would find that really useful but it is fair to say it probably wouldn't be widely used but entail a lot a work.

Never mind, SB has already made testing such things about a billion of degrees easier ( testing various versions of Perl modules on various versions of Perl ) and I get the feeling that SB will eliminate the need for me to use an Administrator account to play games ( simply install them normally and access them through SB ).

Perhaps that should be a touted feature?

[Xyem]

And in case anyone was wondering, that Guest was me. Forgot to log in >.<

[tzuk]

I don't know about games, I read on some Internet forums that copy protection schemes do not always work inside the sandbox, so as they say, "your mileage may vary."

In some cases reported here, adding the CDROM drive as a Full Access File Access resource, helped.

[Xyem]

I'm far too lazy to go about changing CDs so that shouldn't be an issue.

Thanks for the tip though, I will make a post of how it goes when I test it out ( I intend on re-installing Windows and then running pretty much everything through Sandboxie )

[street011]

like tzuk suggested, i always create copy of my sandbox and then create different versions.

if you want to see differences you can use special software to compare files and folders on their contents.

[Xyem]

That's pretty much what I have done. I hit another annoyance ( only being able to use A-Z0-9 ) though..

I made my sandboxes like this:
AP510 <- Create, install Perl 5.10 inside
AP510M564G <- Copy AP510 folder, install OpenGL 0.56_4 inside

Repeated for Perl 5.8 and such. Works well but as you can imagine, using up disk space..