Driver backup is necessary but often ignored. If we have been using a system for a long time and Windows Update has been running and updating drivers, most probably all the drivers will be the latest stable versions for your hardware devices. If you don’t want to download those drivers again and again, you should probably backup the drivers from right within the Windows system instead of downloading them again and again from the Internet.
If you want to update your device drivers to the latest version, you can check out our list of 5 tools to automatically update drivers. Or you can also find the unknown drivers of your system. Or if there is a driver which is problematic and you don’t want to update it from Windows Update, you can simply disable the updates from Windows Update for that specific driver.
Backup device drivers using PowerShell
Windows PowerShell is a great utility to run various scripts and commands. You can use PowerShell to export and backup all drivers to be at safer side.
If you are planning to reinstall your Windows, just run a command and make back up of all drivers. Go with following steps to carry the backup process.
- Open PowerShell window with administrative privileges.
- Firstly, you have to export the drivers. I am making a backup at D drive, you can enter your required drive. To start the process, run following command.
Export-WindowsDriver –Online –Destination D:\Backup
- The command will take a little time to complete its execution, as it has to export all system’s drivers.
- After execution, all exported drivers will be shown in Windows PowerShell window.
- Now I’ll move to my D drive to check, have drivers exported correctly? Yes, all drivers are successfully exported to my required destination.
- Close PowerShell Window, and now you can reinstall Windows. And re-use these drivers for next time drivers installation.
Driver backup using DriverBackup
DriverBackup is a third-party tool which can backup all your system device drivers and can easily restore them when you want them to be restored. This is a safe tool for saving your drivers as it is hard to download each driver on every Windows reinstall. DriverBackup also includes an interactive command line builder.
DriverBackup generates autorun files for drivers restoration, automatically. It can even able to recognize the unknown devices. DriverBackup is compatible with 64-bit systems too. No installation is required, as it is free, light-weight and portable tool.
Backup your drivers easily and only do the installation of drivers on time of need because every driver is already present in your system as a backup. This is time-saving and your Internet data saving technique.
