How To Back Up Your Windows Registry

Posted on August 11, 2008 by LJ Earnest
Categories: Techniques

Photo by markhillary There are a lot of recommendations out there right now on how to make your Windows XP system last longer, to get past the danger of having to buy a machine with Vista. Most of these recommendations involve cleaning out your registry. But if you don’t know what you are doing, registry modification can crash your machine permanently.

Luckily, with one action, you can back up your registry so that if you do mess it up, you can restore it easily. Here’s how:

Backing Up Windows Registry

From your start menu, choose run. In the box that pops up, type regedit and press enter. This will open up the Windows Registry Editor.
From the File menu, choose Export.
At the bottom of the save window, choose All from the Export Range box.
Enter a file name in the box and choose a location. (I recommend something like Registry20080821.reg, so you have a visible reminder it is a registry file, and it was created on 8/21/2008).
Click Save.

Restoring a Windows Registry

It is important to remember that if you have done anything between exporting and importing registries, you could very well lose data. Working without a current backup, I managed to delete all my printer profiles one evening.

From your start menu, choose run. In the box that pops up, type regedit and press enter. This will open up the Windows Registry Editor.
From the File menu, choose Import.
Select your backup file created above.
Click Open.

It will give you some confirmation messages to answer.

Photo by markhillary