RegistryBooster 2010 - You no longer need to guess! This free stability scan will help you clean, repair and optimize your system in an easy way.

Backup / Restore the windows registry - ERUNT

Registry Backup and Restore for Windows NT/2000/2003/XP. Freeware. Download ERUNT



With the invention of Windows 95 Microsoft made the wise decision to organize all computer- and application-specific data which was spread over countless INI files before in a centralized Windows database, called the system "registry". The registry is one of the most important parts in every Windows system today, without which the OS would not even boot. And since the registry is quite sensitive to corruption, it is very advisable to backup its according files from time to time.

In MS-DOS based Windows versions (95, 98, Me) the registry consists of the files SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT (and CLASSES.DAT in Windows Me). To backup these files, one can easily go to the Windows folder in Explorer and copy the files to a safe location, for example another folder on the hard disk. Microsoft even supplies a utility called ERU which can be used to backup these and a few other critical system files to a safe location.

Also, Windows 9x/Me automatically create backups of the registry at startup, with Windows 95 always backing up the registry from the previous Windows session, and Windows 98/Me maintaining up to five registry copies from the last five days where Windows was running.

Unfortunately, this is not the case with Windows versions based on the NT kernel. In Windows NT and 2000, the registry is never backed up automatically, and in XP it is backed up only as part of the bloated and resource hogging System Restore program which cannot even be used for a "restore" should a corrupted registry prevent Windows from booting. It has also become impossible to copy the necessary files, now called "hives" and usually named DEFAULT, SAM, SECURITY, SOFTWARE, SYSTEM in the SYSTEM32\CONFIG folder, to another location because they are all in use by the OS. And though the registry in an NT-based Windows is less likely to become corrupted than in other versions, it can still happen, and for these cases NT is simply missing an option for easy registry backup and restore as there is in Windows 9x/Me, to get the system up and running again in no time.

In 2001, as Windows XP began to come pre-installed on many new home user PCs and was likely to become the new Windows standard over the next years, I decided to write a program which offers the ease-of-use of Windows 9x/Me ERU by Microsoft (hence the name ERUNT) to backup the registry, as well as providing an auto-backup capability, for example at Windows startup.

Or, before installing a new program for testing purposes one could save the registry with ERUNT, install and test the program, uninstall it and restore the registry to be 100% sure that no debris is left.

Note: The "Export registry" function in Regedit is USELESS (!) for making a complete backup of the registry. Neither does it export the whole registry (for example, no information from the "SECURITY" hive is saved), nor can the exported file be used later to replace the current registry with the old one. Instead, if you re-import the file, it is merged with the current registry without deleting anything that has been added since the export, leaving you with an absolute mess of old and new entries.

ERUNT Features

- Backup the Windows NT/2000/2003/XP registry to a folder of your choice
- System and current user registries selectable
- Command line switches for automated registry backup and restoration
- Restore the registry in Windows 9x/Me/NT/2000/2003/XP and MS-DOS (all-in-one restore program) or the Windows Recovery Console
- Included in this package: NTREGOPT program for optimizing the registry