Concepts

Is Pinman a backup solution?

Short answer: Pinman captures settings your backup tool can't even see — but it's not a disk image, so keep your backup tool too. The two solve different problems and work well side by side.

What Pinman captures that a backup tool can't#

A disk-level backup (Macrium, Veeam, Time Machine, and friends) images files. Pinman captures configuration across realms, in a structured, setting-aware way:

Files — INI, XML, SQLite, and other config formats (a backup tool sees these too).
Windows registry — individual keys and values.
Windows runtime / device settings — display resolution, audio routing, GPU settings — live, API-driven state that isn't a file at all.

To a backup image, "my display is set to 1080p" is invisible. To Pinman it's a tracked item with history, right next to a line in a config file. That multi-realm, schema-driven capture is the real differentiator — no general-purpose backup tool models it, and it's exactly the state that breaks a cabinet when it drifts.

Pinman also captures only what matters. A schema points it at the specific files, registry areas, and device settings worth watching — signal pulled out of an ocean of system state — so a capture is small and a comparison is readable.

What a backup tool does that Pinman doesn't#

Pinman is not a replacement for real backups. It doesn't do:

Whole-disk or bare-metal imaging — you rebuild a machine from a backup image, not from Pinman.
Your Documents, photos, or applications outside the schema — only what's tracked.
Compression, deduplication, encryption, retention/rotation, or offsite/cloud targets.

For surviving a dead drive, use a dedicated backup tool. That's a different job.

Capture, compare, and recover#

Pinman keeps points on a timeline:

Checkpoint — a frozen record of what's tracked and what changed.
Savepoint — a checkpoint that also keeps the actual file bytes.

From there you can compare any point against live state to see what drifted, and recover in two ways:

Apply a profile — a reusable description of intended state ("Production", "Demo"). Applying it steers every setting it covers back to intent and leaves everything else untouched.
Restore from a savepoint — put the exact captured values back for selected items.

Both are surgical and setting-aware — a coordinated change across files, registry, and device settings at once, not an all-or-nothing image rollback.

Rule of thumb#

Use a backup tool to survive losing the machine. Use Pinman to understand, compare, and steer the configuration running on it. They overlap only a little — and they complement each other.