A backup of those drivers can be a safeguard in case of computer problems, for example when everything needs to be formatted and newly installed. A driver backup before that process could be used to restore the drivers once the system has been setup again.

Semper Driver Backup is a free backup software for the Windows operating system. Unlike standard driver backup programs it runs the backup on all system devices and components. That’s good on the one hand as it makes sure that everything gets backed up, not so good on the other hand for keeping an overview and managing the device backups.

The drivers are backed up with a click on the backup drivers button in the program interface. The software displays a list of drivers and their inf files in the interface.

One of the biggest issues of this technique is that it does not seem possible to restore a single driver from within the application interface. If you click the Import Drivers button all drivers that have been backed up before will be restored.

While that’s convenient if the hardware of the system has not changed, it could be problematic if hardware has been replaced or added.

Drivers are on the other hand placed in a folder under My Documents. Some are stored with inf files that can theoretically be used to install the drivers, provided that it is possible to identify the correct inf file of a device which may not be as easy as it sounds with more than 200 driver files backed up and cryptic names like netrasa.inf or nettun.inf. It is however possible to use the information displayed by Semper Driver Backup to link files to drivers.

It is not difficulty to use, provided that all you want to do is to backup all system drivers or restore them.

How does Semper Driver Backup compare to previously reviewed applications like Double Driver, Driver Magician Lite or the portable application Driver Backup 2?

The core difference is that Semper Driver Backup can only backup and restore all existing drivers whereas the previously reviewed applications can backup and restore drivers selectively.

Interested users can download the backup software from the developer website. It is compatible with all recent versions of the Windows operating system (via).

The software application has a surprisingly small size of just 1 Megabyte and runs pretty solid and fast. After the initial scan of the system’s device drivers a backup can be initiated. It is up to the user to backup all device drivers or only the drivers that have been selected. The backup software provides filters to display only OEM or third party drivers as well as only those drivers that have been digitally signed or are fully portable.

The device drivers can be stored on the computer’s hard drive using custom descriptions, filenames, path formats and device path formats. The device drivers will be stored in separate device folders by default. Each folder contains the drivers of that device. This can be a single .inf file or dozens of files that are needed for the device.

Once a device driver backup has been created it can be used to restore that set of drivers on the computer system. You can either restore a single device driver by installing the driver from the directory it was saved in or all device drivers from withing the device driver backup software.

Backup and restoration of backed up device drivers is a quick and easy process which makes Device Driver 2 a perfect companion for a USB device with enough storage space to store the drivers.

The device driver backup software comes with a few command line parameters to automate the backup and restoration process further. There is also a command line builder which is currently only available in Italian language. It should however be relatively easy to use it to create the parameters needed for the desired operation.

A click on the scan button starts a system scan which took only a matter of seconds on my system. All drivers are afterwards listed in a table in the main program window. They can be sorted by name, date, version, manufacturer and several other parameters with additional filters being available from the top menu. It is for instance possible to list only non-Microsoft drivers.

One or multiple drivers can be selected by checking the box in the first column of the table. A click on the Backup button will open a configuration menu where the user can pick a destination folder for the backup.

The Restore button works in the opposite direction. The user has to browse to an .inf file that has been created by a previous backup so that the driver can be restored. There is also the option to save and print a list of all drivers currently installed on the system.

The website of the developer is no longer online. You can download the latest version of Double Driver here from Ghacks instead. Double Driver (666)

Please note that the tool to backup and restore drivers is no longer updated, which means that it will eventually become incompatible. Alternatives are Driver Magician Lite or Slim Drivers.