Backup and Restore Your Entire Driver Database in Minutes!

Drivers. It can make or break a system. By now, you should know that simply installing a piece of hardware in your computer, whether it may be a complicated piece like a $500 graphics card or a $15 USB mouse, doesn't just magically 'work' by itself. Although a lot of hardware devices you find now days are basically Plug and Play, in the background, software is still what controls that piece of hardware and actually allow you to use and interact with it. If you don't have the right driver for a given piece of hardware, well, you'll just have a nice shiny piece of metal sitting there! In this article, I'll go over a method in how you can simply create a database backup of all the drivers installed in your computer.

While backing up your entire driver database can be considered overkill for many casual users, people who constantly rebuild their machine from scratch will find this a godsend. One of the main hassle from reinstalling drivers after a fresh reformat of your computer system is that you must dig all over the place for the drivers themselves! Although it's relatively easy to visit a manufacturer's website to download their latest driver for your hardware, imagine doing so for all of the other hardware installed on your system! It can be very time consuming and boring to say the least. If you done so before, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

DriverMax
This is a great piece of software that I've come to use a couple of times in the past that saved me a great amount of time whereas drivers were concerned. If you've ever installed a piece of driver before, you'll come to realize that it's a lot like installing a software application. It presents you with a couple of dialog boxes, maybe a EULA, some options you must make etc. After installation, it will usually prompt you to reboot your computer for the effects to take place. After the restart, you then proceed to install the next piece of driver for the next hardware and so on and so on. As you can see, that's not very fun at all. With DriverMax, installing all (I really do mean all!) of your drivers is as simple as installing DriverMax on the system, choosing the Restore option and then point it to your driver backup folder. All of your drivers will be installed at once and only one reboot is needed for your computer to recognize all of your hardware!
DriverMax's other awesome ability is helping you determine and search for newer version of drivers than you currently have installed. Hardware manufacturers release new drivers for their hardware to either patch up bug issues or to provide new capabilities to their device. Although sometimes it's not necessary to have every piece of driver up to date on your system, if you are experiencing some problem for a particular device (for example, if your wireless adapter disconnects you frequently or if your audio always skips), than you'll definitely want to check for a driver upgrade.
While DriverMax is free for backing up and restoring all of your drivers, a paid version is available. With the pro version, DriverMax will allow you to quickly download and install any new driver for your hardware that it finds. With the free version, you are limited to one driver download a day. Another weird aspect is that while the program is free to use, it expires after 30 days. However, you can easily signup for a free registration key by providing your email for them to send it to. If you are not comfortable using your real email address, now is a perfect time to test out the free disposable email address services I've written about here. Once you have registered, the program will then unlock and give you the feature to download drivers from their database. Registration does not mean you unlocked the pro version! You are still limited in what you can do with DriverMax.

# Backing up your drivers
DriverMax gives you the option of whether to back up your entire driver database or only the one's you want. There is one very important note you must remember:

A lot of drivers are made for a specific operating system. In most instances, you should not install drivers for your hardware made for the XP operating system over to a Vista installation and vice-versa.

Backing up your driver simply means selecting Backup Drivers from the Driver Backup and Restore menu. It will then show you a list of all the drivers for the hardware you have installed. You can click the Select All button to backup everything or in the drop down menu on the right, select the category of drivers you want to backup. For example, you can choose to backup only your audio drivers. Therefore, you would select the appropriate choice in the menu and the list of drivers will then reflect your choice. Again, simply select everything or manually place a checkbox next to the driver you want to backup. By default, DriverMax will export the drivers to your My Documents\My Drivers folder. Select a different folder if you wish and hit Next. DriverMax will then begin exporting the drivers to the folder.

Please move this folder to an external drive or onto another partition! If you save it on your C: drive and you reformat your computer, the drivers will be deleted along with everything else!

# Restoring your drivers
Another note you should consider:

In order to quickly reinstall all of your drivers, DriverMax needs to be installed on your newly built machine. If you don't have your network card drivers installed, then you won't be able to get on the Internet to download DriverMax. Therefore, save a copy of DriverMax itself (the executable) and install the program first on the new machine. Remember, DriverMax can be used for 30 days before expiration.

Restoring all of your drivers is another piece of cake. In DriverMax, select the Restore Drivers from Backup option and select the folder holding all of the drivers. The restore process will immediately begin. Once it's done, all it takes is a simple reboot and all of your hardware should be recognized!




# Checking for driver updates with DriverMax
DriverMax makes it easy to check whether or not you are up to date with your drivers. To do so, simply select the Check Online for Driver Updates option. It will then present you a webpage with the results. If you have drivers installed that are not the newest version, it will be marked with a red X. DriverMax will display the current version of the driver you have installed along with the newest version available. You can decide to download the new driver for installation but the free version of DriverMax will only allow one download a day.

As you can see below, I have a couple of outdated drivers. I will update the graphics adapter to show how easy it is to install the newest version found by DriverMax.






As you can see, updating the driver was very easy. However, I do have to warn you that not all installations will go as smooth. Drivers, along with other software installations, can sometimes go bad for no apparent reason. Another issue with driver installation is that although they installed without any hitches, it can however cause system instabilities. For example, it could be that after installing a new graphics driver, your screen begins to flicker or will display contorted images and whatnot. If that does happen, you need to do a driver rollback or restore your system with a system restore point to go back to the driver you had installed previously. I cannot stress enough how important it is to create a restore point BEFORE installing a new driver!Drivers are not something you should mess around with. Even professionals can have driver problems on their computers which they will never find the answer to. Sometimes you just have to take the advice that if something isn't broken, don't fix it!
Although DriverMax only allows you to download one driver from their database a day, you can just as well use their driver checking feature by itself. That way, you'll know exactly what drivers are out of date. If you really do want to install the driver, you can easily head over to the manufacturer's website and download the same driver.

REMEMBER: ONLY DOWNLOAD DRIVERS FROM A REPUTABLE SOURCE.

If you have the knowledge, you can go over the changes the new driver version will provide to your system. Although sometimes manufacturer's make this information very cryptic and incomprehensible but to the most hardcore computer users, there are other times when they detail it in easy to read form.
The last point I want to make is that this method of backing up and restoring drivers with DriverMax can be considered obsolete. If you have been using Windows Vista and Windows 7, you'll realize that out of the box, the operating system ships with tons of pre-installed drivers for today's most popular devices. There is a good chance that plugging in your device will have the operating system instantly search its database of drivers and install the right one for use. Also, you can search for driver updates directly from Microsoft as well with automatic updates. Although using 'generic' drivers will suffice more a lot of devices, there are times when you need to install the drivers directly from the manufacturer themselves because they can help unlock other potentials and capabilities that the Microsoft drivers cannot. For example, using Microsoft's default driver for your $400 printer will allow you to simply print out pages and whatnot. But when you actually want to manage it and make use of it's other advance capabilities, you'll want to use the driver created by the printer's manufacturer. DriverMax is good at backing up your third party drivers installed. If all it is you are using are default drivers from Microsoft, you don't really have to worry about backing up your driver database.