One of the things that I’ve always felt should have been included with XP is a utility to backup all of the drivers installed and/or in use. When faced with an inevitable rebuild it is always comforting to have all the drivers handy but typically some drivers may not match the ones installed (or may not be available any more!). One way around this of course is to keep all your drivers together and when you download new ones to update your collection – but lets face it – this isn’t likely is it?

I have been looking around for a utility that will allow me to backup all the drivers on an XP machine so that rebuilding a machine becomes an easier task. I don’t necessarily want to image the machine – just ensure that I can restore all the drivers that are currently installed.

A few utilities I have seen (but not tried) so far include:

Innovative Solutions DriverMax which says “Simply export all your current drivers (or just the ones that work ok) to a folder or a compressed file. After reinstalling Windows you will have everything in one place!“.

XP Tools Software Backup Driver which describes itself as “Backup Driver is a utility to back up your Windows system driver files. It can identify all of your Windows driver files and save them to a secure location in two simple mouse-clicks.“.

Driver-Soft Driver Genius Professional Edition 2007 which “Backup, restore and update all your drivers in several mouse clicks. Get new driver for your computer now!“.

GoldSolution Software DriverMagician which “identifies all the hardware in the system, extracts their associated drivers from the hard disk and backs them up to a location of your choice“.

I plan to give these products, and any others I find, a test run to see which works best for my situation and I’ll post updates as I try them.