Another Way to Backup and Restore Drivers in Windows 11

September 3, 2022 updated by Admin Leave a reply »

Need to save all your installed drivers on your PC? Before doing a clean install, it’s advise to backup all existing drivers so you don’t need to spend time downloading each driver and avoid compatibility issues. We’ve already covered how to backup & restore device drivers using the DISM command. In this tutorial, we’ll show you another way to backup and restore drivers in Windows 11.

Part 1: Backup and Restore Drivers Using Windows Terminal

  1. Right-click the Start button on the taskbar and click “Windows Terminal (Admin)“.

  2. When the Command Prompt or Windows PowerShell launches, enter the following command and press Enter to backup all your drivers. Make sure you replace D:\DriverBackup with the folder you created for saving the exported drivers.
    pnputil /export-driver * "D:\DriverBackup"

    Just like creating driver backup, restoring it is also pretty simple and easy to perform. Just run this command to reinstall all the drivers you’ve saved.
    pnputil /add-driver "D:\DriverBackup\*.inf" /subdirs /install

Part 2: Restore All Drivers Using Device Manager

  1. Press the Windows key + R together to open a Run window. Type devmgmt.msc and then click OK to launch Device Manager.

  2. Right-click your computer’s name at the top of the device list, and choose Add drivers.

  3. Click on Browse to select the location where you’ve backed up the device drivers, tick the “Include subfolders” checkbox and click Next.

  4. The program will restore and install all your drivers and Windows 11 can then identify the unknown devices with their proper drivers.

That’s it!