Backing up your drivers is a wise approach to proactively maintaining your PC. Here we’ll explain how to backup drivers and provide a couple of options that can easily provide a good driver backup solution for your PC. This is going to save you lots of time and headaches, so make sure you use one of these methods.

The first approach comes from a batch file provided by PC World**, the batch file makes it easy to backup and restore your current driver configuration, however it is also specified that this process backs up more files than it actually needs and it also does not work very well with Windows Vista. The batch file will copy needed files to a directory in the “My Documents” folder called “driverback”, this folder can then be copied to an external drive or CD ROM for safekeeping.

The restore process for this approach is also straight forward, for this you simply go to Start > Run and type sysdm.cpl and press ENTER. Select the hardware tab and the device manager button and repeat the following steps for each device that needs restoring.

1. Right click the device and select update drivers
2. In the hardware update wizard select “install from a list or specified location” and click next
3. Check “include this location in the search” and point it to your driverback folder. Click next.

Again this driver backup and restore process does not work all that well with Windows Vista, so in order to do a driver backup on this OS version you’ll need a different approach. There are a number of freeware programs that can help to backup drivers on windows Vista.

ZManda is an open source backup software that can help with driver backups and local files, this software is not entirely free but it has a very low cost. Some free applications like DriverMax and DriverBackup are designed to specifically backup driver configurations on your PC, even though these are free applications you must register to use them.

There are other driver backup software that are not free, but the backup function can be accomplished prior to the update of the driver when using a driver scan tool, which automatically backs up drivers before updating them to a new version.

**Info Source: batch file backup method explanation was referenced from this article: “http://www.pcworld.com/article/151125/how_do_i_back_up_my_drivers.html”