If you work in IT, no doubt you have had to backup user data. This is a lot easier these days with the proliferation of cloud storage and cloud apps, particularly Microsoft 365. One issue you may have is that while it is easy to back up and restore data, you still have to reinstall software. This one utility can be used in concert with other tools to make a manual process easier. Windows has a built in utility that backs up all of your installed printers, drivers, print queues and custom ports to a single, portable file that can be restored later through the same utility.
To access this tool, you’ll want to open a Powershell or Command Prompt or Windows Terminal as administrator. The easiest way to do this is to right click the start button to get the right click context menu full of shortcuts to useful tools. You should see an option for Command Prompt (admin), Powershell (admin) or Terminal (admin). Click this option to launch it. In the command line window that opens, you’ll enter the following command and press enter.
printbrmui
This is key. In order for this to work, you have to run the tool with admin privileges when backing up, as well as when restoring. This will give you a wizard which you step through to easily save your backup to a file. When you’re ready to restore it, you follow the same process, but chose the option to restore rather than backup.
In my process I used to use the Windows easy transfer tool to backup user preferences and files. But after Windows 8 the tool was removed from the Operating system. You can still grab a copy from a Windows 7 machine and run it on a Windows 10 machine for example. But when the tool was removed with modern versions of Windows, the functionality of automatically backing up printers was removed from the tool. So in this way, you can use your preferred method to back up the user’s files and when finished you can also backup the printers. The only thing left to do after moving the data and printers to the new computer will be to reinstall your drivers and programs. More on that later. Programs can’t easily be moved unfortunately in Windows like they can in MacOS and Linux. BUT, you can also copy your drivers, but hopefully if you have a name brand computer like a Dell, they have a program like Dell Command Update that will automatically download and install all your drivers automatically. But we’ll get back to those things later as I write more articles on how to move data, or really how to wipe and reload a system without losing data.
