Registry Backup from Tweaking.com is a free utility to backup and restore your system registry.
It’s always a good idea to backup the Windows registry at regular intervals, especially before you make any ‘high risk’ changes to your computer – so you can restore it later if required.
Backing up using System Restore has a few issues – if one restore point gets corrupted it can have a knock on effect and make all the other restore points fail too.
Also, you can’t just backup a certain part of the registry (it’s all or nothing) and you can’t do a restore in Windows XP from outside of Windows – no use if you can’t start XP due to registry corruption…
Why not use ERUNT? The free utility ERUNT is an old alternative to System Restore but hasn’t been updated in years and it uses the registry function RegSaveKey to backup the registry. According to Microsoft, “Applications that back up or restore system state including system files and registry hives should use the Volume Shadow Copy Service instead of the registry functions”.
Registry Backup from Tweaking.com does use the recommended Volume Shadow Copy Service for backups and is regularly updated. It also lets you backup any part (or all) of the registry, restore from Windows or Safe Mode (and Recovery Console) and keeps each backup separate to avoid knock on failure.
Registry Backup – Key Features
- One click backup and restore.
- Automatic cleanup of older backups (30 days by default).
- Set and control scheduling options (at each logon by default).
- Can backup & restore all user profiles on the system, not just the ones that are currently loaded (better than ERUNT).
- Control which registry files are backed up or restored.
- Detailed logs are saved with each backup.
- Multiple easy restore options – including from Safe Mode and Recovery Console
- Online videos showing how to use the program and how to use the different restore options.
Download
Download Registry Backup here – available as a standard installer or as a portable version (can be run from a flash drive and keep backups of multiple systems).
It is compatible with XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.
The program is divided into 4 tabs:
Backup Registry – choose what to backup (all selected by default). Click ‘Backup Now’ then wait a minute or two until it finishes.
Restore Registry – choose a backup to restore from the dropdown list (by default, they are stored in C:\RegBackup directory – can be changed in Settings)
Settings – options to change the directory used to store backups, disable checking for updates, set how often to delete old backups and change when to schedule automatic backups.
Help & Support – includes links to online Help/FAQ, How-to-videos and Support forums.
Conclusion
Registry Backup is a newer and more powerful utility which is easy to use and has a good user interface. It makes registry backups simple and provides automatic backups.
Because each restore folder is independent and stored separately, there is no chance that one corrupted backup folder can corrupt all the other backup folders (making restore impossible) – System Restore is infamous for this problem and frequently makes it impossible to perform a system restore back to any point in time.
