Is it necessary to backup the registry?

If you ever edit the registry, you should back it up first. System Restore Points are not releasable and I have never used them.. I use Macrium Reflect to backup/restore my system and it has never failed me.

Macrium Software | Your Image is Everything

Agreed restoring system restore points is very unreliable. If that works, great.

The situations when a registry backup is actually useful are few and far between. Why? Consistency. If you restore a backup, you may create inconsistencies with many other things.

Sometimes restoring the registry from Regbackup can help recover an otherwise unbootable PC.

For what it's worth, Tweaking.com offers a registry backup tool, for example.

** If your Regback folder is empty, please check the scheduled task here:


I found I needed to create a trigger as none was defined.
(Microsoft\Windows\Registry in the left column)

Note: you can then test the scheduled task immediately by rt click, run, and check the date the Regback folder was updated.

I have never found backing up registry on its own to be of any real value. I know we are always warned about registry changes can brick pc, but then you cannot reverse it anyway!

Nearly all regedits we see here are easily reversed.

Like most regulars here say, image backups are the best idea.

Well, it was a surprise to me the schedule was not in place- I had thought it was a feature and had never investigated it.

The choice is yours. You could have it set to startup rather than logon - logon would be too frequent. Obviously it will slow the startup a little as a copy is made. I don't know the intended default, but as you know, that there was expected to be a backup is reflected in the recovery posts using it.

(As I said, and @Cerberus reflected, the value is very limited -perhaps MS removed this task at some point... Might be interesting to know what others see).