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.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Topic Drivers » Backing (and Restoring) XP Drivers // Mar 29, 2008 at 3:35 am
[...] Danial: [...]
2 Cheaty // Mar 29, 2008 at 7:26 pm
It would be great if You could test them and give us all know whether You managed to make a drivers-backup for the whole machine. I tried to do something similar some time ago but resigned, as it just didn’t pass any tests.
3 IT PRO: Blogs: Jason Slater: Where did I put that driver disc? // Mar 31, 2008 at 10:25 am
[...] recently talked about problems with Backing Up (and Restoring) XP Drivers and have been trying to find a reliable method for hardware driver management. With so many [...]
4 Micromicon Blog » Blog Archive » Blogosphere technology posts for 31st March 2008 // Mar 31, 2008 at 4:10 pm
[...] Backing (and Restoring) XP Drivers [...]
5 jasonslater // Apr 1, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Thanks for the comment Cheaty, I have already started looking at DriverMax so be sure to check back to see how things get on.
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