Hi,
Creating a restore point in System Restore will backup most of the registry.
The SAM hives which contains passwords is not restored.
Create a manual restore point before editing the registry.
If the registry edit causes problems, use System Restore as soon as possible
to correct it. Just remember that all registry entry's made after the
restore point being use will be removed. That goes the same for all
monitored files.
List of files and folders System Restore monitors:
http://bertk.mvps.org/html/filesfolders.html
ERUNT is an excellent tool for backing up just the registry. It will also
allow the registry to be restored even if Windows will not boot.
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt
When you say "registry backup" are you referring to Exporting within
Regedit? If so read the following.
Export and import within Regedit is *not* a good method of backing up the
entire registry. Its value is where you are going to modify a small section
- export that section, then if needed delete it and re-import to put things
back.
First the backups are text mode, largely in Unicode and are enormous.
Second there is no proper way to restore it. Import does not replace the
current registry but merges the file into it causing the registry to be come
severely bloated. Thus unwanted additions made since the export are not
removed - which is very often what you want to do.
And third when you want to use it may not be practicable, particularly if
the system will not boot.
System Restore is the built in method of restoring the registry.
Regards,
Bert Kinney MS-MVP Shell/User
http://bertk.mvps.org
Member:
http://dts-l.org