Back up and Restore Network Printers

Often times in the enterprise environment, when a new PC is deployed, the technician has to set up the network printers that the user had on their previous machine. Often times this can be a fairly long list of printers. Rather than making a note of each printer and restoring them one at a time or dragging the short cuts to a share, the technician can back up and restore a registry key. This key is:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Printers\Connections

There are couple of easy ways to back up this key on the old machine and restore it on the new machine.

Method One

Goto Start>Run>REGEDIT

Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Printers\Connections




Right-click the folder and select Export. Save the .reg file on a network drive or an external hard drive.



Log on to the user's account on the new machine and simply double-click the .reg file. Confirm that you want to add the settings to the registry.

In XP, goto Printers and Faxes. In Vista and Windows 7, goto Devices and Printers. Right click on each printer and select Connect. Right-click on the printer that is to be the default and select Set as default.

Method Two

One can also backup the registry key from the command line. The following command will backup the key to the \\server\share network path. Be sure to put quotes around any paths that have spaces in them. Obviously, modify the command to meet your needs.

REGEDIT /E "\\server\share\printers.reg" "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Printers\Connections"

On the new machine, follow the above directions to restore the network printers.

That's it. You can incorporate method two into a .bat file if you wish.