Greetings, I'm Professor Kay and in this short video presentation, we're going to see how we go about backing up the registry for our Windows Server. I'm currently logged on to my primary domain controller for my server 2016 domain DC one. But this lab will work for any type of Windows machine, Windows 10, Windows seven, server 2012, server 2016, or even server 2019. The reason this registry is so important is because the Windows registry is a hierarchal database that stores low level settings for the Microsoft Windows operating system. And for applications that opt to use the registry. So everything that you're going to do on your Windows operating system, the registry is what makes it happen.
We can access and backup the system's registry just by using regedit. Now we can do this by just holding down the Windows key and hitting R and then a run line we just type in reg edit, then just go ahead and play Click ok. This opens up the default registry editor for any type of Windows operating system. And you can expand these and you can see all the different keys that you have. And there are literally hundreds if not thousands of keys that you can modify, change. And anytime that you're thinking about making a major change to your operating system, it's always a good idea to go into the registry and do a backup.
To begin the process of backing up your registry, just go to the very top where it says computer, you're going to right click, and from here, you're going to select Export. From here, you're going to want to select the location that you want to save this registry to. So we can just pull down this menu here, and let's use the root of the C drive. For the file name. We can just type in rich, edit backup, and you can give it a date. If you're going to have multiple backups present, how you wish to name your backup register files is up to you.
This is just something that can give you an idea how you want to back it up and save it so that you recognize it, if you need it. So now we can say save. And now it's going to back up that registry to the root of our C drive. And it can take a few minutes, maybe longer, but you got to be patient. Now that our registry had been backed up, let's go take a look at it. Let's go to File Explorer.
Once we're up inside the file explorer, let's go to this PC. And let's click on the C drive. And there's our registry. It's about three megabytes in size. And depending on your operating system, it can get bloated very quickly. It is always a good idea to from time to time to attempt to clean out the registry using a registry cleaner, or some other type of software.
The Windows operating system does do an automatic backup for you, but it may not be as concurrent as you like. Now, if you have a problem after installing a program You may not be able to boot to the desktop, if you go into the advanced menu, you'll see an option to boot to the last known good. That is that backup registry that Windows backed up before you restarted the machine. So the machine should be able to load the last known good before you make changes to it and get you back to your desktop. Now once the machine gets to the desktop that backed up or that last known good is going to be overwritten. If you would like to examine the backed up registry that Windows does automatically just open up your file explorer, you can go into system 32, open up the config folder.
And from here you can go into the ridge back and there are the five keys that are backed up on your system automatically. Now if you would like to restore your registry from a backup, you can go your last backup that you created. And you just double click it and then you're going to To get this message asking you Are you sure, you can then say yes, and it will completely restore your registry to this last known backup. Now in the event that your system will not start and you need to get access to this registry backup, you can take your DVD, you can go into the repair mode, you can launch the command prompt in safe mode. And from there, you can get access to this registry backup and restore from that location. So in this short video presentation, we saw how to backup and restore our Windows registry.