How to back up drivers before an update

Why this one is worth the ten minutes

Most software you can reinstall. Drivers have three properties that make them different.

The failure takes out the tool you would use to recover. A bad network driver means no downloading a replacement. A bad display driver means working blind or in safe mode.

The old version disappears. Vendors publish the current driver and remove the previous one. Six months later, the version that worked is on a forum thread, or nowhere.

And the built-in rollback is not always there. Windows keeps one previous version — sometimes. If the update came through a vendor installer that removed the old package first, there is nothing to roll back to.

Ten minutes of copying beforehand removes all three problems.

Export what is already installed

On Windows, the driver store can be exported without any extra software:

pnputil /export-driver * C:\driver-backup

That writes every third-party driver package currently installed — the .inf files and everything they reference — into a folder. Run it from an elevated prompt. Copy the folder somewhere that is not the machine.

Export-WindowsDriver -Online -Destination C:\driver-backup in PowerShell does the same job.

This covers third-party drivers, which is what you want: Microsoft’s inbox drivers come back with the operating system.

Then record what you exported

Copying the files is the easy half. The half people skip is being able to prove, later, that the folder still contains what you put in it.

A backup folder that has been sitting on a shared drive for a year may have been touched by anything — a sync client that resolved a conflict, an antivirus quarantine, a partial copy, someone tidying up. Take a hash of every file at the moment you make the copy, keep the manifest, and a check before you restore takes seconds and tells you whether you are about to install what you think you are.

Know what actually changed

After an update, the useful question is not “did something change” but “what”. Inventory the driver folder before, inventory it after, diff the two, and you get exactly which packages were replaced, which version each moved from and to, and which are new.

That turns “the machine has been odd since Tuesday” into a list of three candidates.

Restoring

If a driver goes bad:

1. Device Manager → Properties → Driver → Roll Back Driver. Try this first; it is instant when it is available.
2. Safe mode, if the machine will not get far enough to try step one. A basic display driver is loaded there, which is enough to work.
3. Install from your export. Point Device Manager’s update wizard at the backup folder, or use pnputil /add-driver with the .inf.

For anything graphics-related, use the vendor’s clean-install option if it has one. Layered driver installations are a common cause of problems that survive a reinstall.

The programs for this

• DriverGuard takes real copies, not just a list: snapshot walks a folder and stores the actual bytes under a label, check compares the folder against a snapshot, and rollback puts one file back — a dry run unless you pass --apply.
• DriverPilot does the before-and-after. It parses Windows .inf packages, inventories a driver folder, and diffs two inventories so you can see exactly what changed. It reads package files only: it never touches the live Windows driver store and installs nothing.
• DeviceDriver seals a driver folder into a manifest of every file’s SHA-256, so you can prove months later that not one byte moved. It checks file integrity against your own manifest — it does not verify Authenticode or catalogue signatures, and it says so.
• DriverRollback snapshots a driver tree and restores the exact bytes, with a ledger of what it did. Dry run unless you insist.

Free while we are in preview, one file each, Windows and Mac. None of them install a driver or touch the live driver store — they handle the copy, the comparison and the proof, and Windows handles the installing.

When to do it

Before a Windows feature update. Before any graphics driver change. Before installing a manufacturer’s “update all your drivers” utility, which is the single most common way a working machine stops working.

And once a year on a machine that is fine, so that the backup is not two operating system versions old on the day you need it.