Device Driver Backup

Driver Backup 2 is a portable open source software that can be used to backup and restore the drivers of a Windows computer system.

The backup software scans the computer system after start automatically for installed hardware and drivers. It displays the discovered devices and drivers in a list divided into categories; this looks like the listing of the Windows device manager, so that Windows users should feel right at home using the program.

The software application has a surprisingly small size of just 1 Megabyte and runs pretty solid and fast.

Driver Backup

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 comes with filters to display only OEM or third party drivers as well as only those drivers that have been digitally signed or are fully portable.

You may enable these filters to select or deselect drivers from the listing. This makes it super easy to back up only user installed drivers for instance.

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 a single 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 within the device driver backup software.

Closing words

Backup of hardware drivers, and restoration of backed up device drivers is a quick and easy process using Driver Backup. This makes the portable program a handy addition to any tools collection, be it on DVD or -- better -- USB Flash Drive as it makes for some easy driver backup and restore jobs.

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.

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