What is sysrestoredriver?

SysRestoreDriver is an open-source Windows kernel driver that makes a hard drive automatically revert to a clean state every time the computer restarts. Once protection is turned on for a volume, any file write that would normally go to the disk is silently redirected to free space elsewhere on the drive. When the machine reboots, those redirected writes are discarded and the disk looks exactly as it did when protection was first enabled. The effect is similar to commercial products used in internet cafes and school computer labs, but built entirely from scratch under an open-source license. The project comes with a desktop management application called QHEngineUI, which provides a simple window where an administrator can choose which disk volumes to protect and toggle protection on or off. The driver file is embedded inside this application, so there is only one executable to run. Both the driver and the UI are built using Microsoft's own driver development toolkit with no third-party dependencies. The driver works only on NTFS-formatted volumes and has been tested on Windows 10 and Windows 11. It can protect multiple volumes independently, including the system drive, data drives, USB drives, and external media. Non-NTFS volumes are automatically skipped. Turning protection off requires a reboot to take effect, by design: while protection is active the disk's internal metadata is frozen at the moment protection was enabled, and simply unloading the driver mid-session would corrupt the file system. The README includes measured performance numbers from benchmark testing. Sequential large-file writes slow down by roughly 35 to 59 percent under protection, while small random reads and writes show less than 6 percent overhead. The author notes that the primary bottleneck is the defensive copy step required before each write. The project is in early release (v0.1) and the README carries a clear data-safety warning: test on a virtual machine first and keep a full backup before deploying on any machine with important data.