Drivers Analysis, Backup, and Restoration with Double Driver

About Double Driver

One of the main reasons why you would want to collect installed drivers is if you don’t have the Driver CD that came with the computer or they are unavailable online. This comes in quite handy if you purchase a computer and want to backup the initial set of drivers. It can be quite difficulty for example to find drivers for hardware installed in a notebook if the operating system has to be setup again. Luckily Double Driver can now lend you a hand with that and save you a lot of time.

Double Driver is a very simple and useful tool which not only allows you to view all the drivers installed on your system but also allows you to backup, restore, save and print all chosen drivers simply and reliably.

Double Driver analyzes your system and lists the most important driver details such as version, date, provider, etc and offers you the chance to update to the latest version. All drivers that are found can easily be backed up the application and easily restored at a later point in one go.

What can you do with Double Driver?

With Double Driver you can:

• View all installed drivers;
• Backup all installed drivers (as uncompressed folders, compressed .ZIP, or compressed self-extractor);
• Restore drivers from backups;
• Save details on all installed drivers in a TXT file;
• Print details on all installed drivers.

How to use Double Driver?

Double Driver works in a simple way: you hit "Scan" and all the drivers installed on your system are displayed (it takes literally less than one second to scan your computer and find all installed drivers).

Scroll up and down to view all your installed drivers and scroll left and right to view details on each driver, such as what type of driver it is (i.e. a video driver or a modem driver). Check the checkbox next to the drivers you want to backup - by default all "non-Microsoft" drivers are checked. "Microsoft drivers" are the drivers that are installed when you install Windows so you don't need to backup those ones.

Once you have selected all the drivers you want to backup hit "Backup". You will be asked to specify where to save the backup, what type of backup, and a few other details.

There are two things to note:

1. The different types of backups you can make ("Output");
2. The ability to create a portable Double Driver to put with each backup.

The advantage of including a portable version of Double Driver with each backup is that you can restore your backups without ever having to install Double Driver - even if you don't choose the self-extractor option.

Restoring is just as easy as backing up. When you want to restore, if you did a folder or .ZIP backup, you will need to restore via Double Driver. If you included a portable version of Double Driver with your backup you can just run Double Driver from there. When you have Double Driver running (portable version or otherwise) hit "Restore" and do your restore. If you did a self-extractor, than just run the self-extractor .EXE and do your restore.

Take note that you can pick and choose which drivers you want to restore.

Website: http://www.boozet.org/dd.htm

Easily backup and restore your system drivers with DriverBackup

DriverBackup is a free and easy-to-use Device Drivers’ backup and restore utility that comes with command line options, path formatting and automatic driver restoration. It can easily backup and restore all the currently installed device drives automatically without the need for re-downloading drivers or using CD-ROMs.

Backing up drivers is very useful in case things go wrong. Specifically, if you decide to re-install your operating system it is possible/likely that you will need to invest considerable time and energy hunting down the correct device drivers online or on random CDs that you didn’t know you had. You can prevent this by using a program like DriverBackup and instantly get all of your drivers restored. The other situation where having drivers backed up is useful is if your drivers are corrupted and/or your hardware is not working properly, in which case you can use DriverBackup to remove the drivers as well as quickly get your working drivers back.

Here are some notes on this program:

• The main window: lists all types of drivers that are installed in the system with their full info.
• Selection modes: the three available modes of operation are: (a) Backup (b) Restore, and (c) Remove.
• The backup process: is fairly straightforward. Check the drivers you want to backup, select the path, and (optionally) enter a short description about the device/driver type.
• Filtering: you can filter the list of drivers using tabs ("All" "OEM", and "Third Party" drivers). You can also use the "Digital Signature" and "Full portability" buttons to select the device which has WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) signature and full portability button list you the device drivers which has full capability to be backup and restore.
• Restore: allows you to select and restore the previous versions of drivers that has been saved by the Driverbackup program in case of errors.
• Remove drivers: gives you a very simply and handy method to remove drivers, if that is what you want.
• Automatic Driver Restoration: this functionality under "Start Backup" is designed to create the necessary files if the drivers are to be restored on a system which doesn’t have "DriverBackup" installed. The "Generate file for auto-restoration” checkbox forces DriverBackup! to generate executable files for automatic drivers’ restoration. These files include a batch file “Restore.bat” and “Autorun.inf” that enables autorun in removable devices (USB Flash,CD-DVD-ROM). Note that in order to enable autorun, backup files (Backup Info file “.BKI” and directory tree) must be copied in the root path of device.
• Command Line Builder: this feature can be accessed from the "Tools" menu and is like magic; it offers a simple way to access DriverBackup from a command line or script. For example you can burn the driver files into a Windows CD and all drivers can be installed from the command line at once; very cool!

The verdict: this program combines powerful functionality with an Easy GUI that both a "normal" and advanced user can easily interact with. There is no hitch in the backup/restore functionality, and expert functions like "Command line Builder" and "Automatic Driver Restoration" can be extremely useful.

Review: FreewareGenius

My comments:

The utility is light on resources, fast, reliable, and can be run with no installation in portable mode. However, I have found a problem running the utility in the Safe Mode. While this observation was not confirmed on multiple computers yet, note on this possible limitation.

Website: http://sourceforge.net/projects/drvback/