Best 3 Free Programs to Backup and Restore Computer Drivers

Whenever Windows decides not to be with us anymore, we are left with no other option but to reinstall it. But after reinstalling Windows we face another difficult task of finding and installing all the device drivers for the devices to work properly. It’s a difficult task as most of the time we tend to loose our driver disks or worse driver disks may be corrupt. If this is the situation then we are left with no option other then searching the manufacturer’s site for device drivers for our particular devices. It becomes more difficult to find them if the devices old and no longer supported.

We could have avoided such a situation if we had taken a backup of our device drivers and after reinstalling Windows just restore them back. Use any of these 3 free utilities which can help you easily take backup of your device drivers and restore them back whenever you want. This will also save you a lot of time since restoring for most of this utilities is an one click job! Also, some of them provides the facility of updating your drivers online.

DriverMax comes from the Innovative Solutions stable and is available both as free and paid versions. Using DriverMax we can export all our current drivers (or just the ones that work OK) to a folder or a compressed file. So, after reinstalling Windows we will have everything in one place to restore them easily. It also allows us to download the latest driver updates for our computer. DriverMax only works on Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Windows 2003 (all service packs). Driver downloads are only available for Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP users.

DriverBackup! is a fast, light weight, and user friendly tool for driver’s backup, restoration and removal with command line options, automatic restoration from CDDVD and path formatting. DriverBackup! includes also an interactive command line builder.

Double Driver is a very simple and useful tool which not only allows to view all the drivers installed on the system but also allows to backup, restore, save and print all chosen drivers simply and reliably. All drivers that are found can easily be backed up the application and easily restored at a later point in one go.

Footnote: (If you are puzzled or new to the word “device drivers”, then this may come handy!)

Don’t get puzzled, we are here to help you! OK, so your question is “What are device drivers anyways?” Well, a device driver, or a software driver is a type of computer software, typically developed to make the hardware in your computer work. Often called a driver for short, it is a specialized hardware dependent computer program which is also operating system specific that enables another program, typically an operating system or applications software package or computer program running under the operating system kernel, to interact transparently with a hardware device, and usually provides the requisite interrupt handling necessary for any necessary asynchronous time-dependent hardware interfacing needs. You may also visit the wiki page about device drivers for more in-depth information!