How to Back Up the System Registry Automatically When Restarting Windows 11

This article explains how to turn to enable automatic system registry backup when you restart Windows 11.

Before Windows 10, version 1803, there used to be a setting that allowed automatic system registry backup to the RegBack folder when the system restarts.

Windows no longer backs up the system registry automatically upon restart. If you browse to the \Windows\System32\config\RegBack folder in Windows Explorer, you will still see each registry hive, but each file is 0 kb in size.

This change is by design and is intended to help reduce the overall disk footprint size of Windows.

When you turn on this feature, Windows creates a RegIdleBackup task and stores it in the Scheduled Task Library.

Here’s how to re-enable this feature so that Windows automatically creates a system registry backup when the system restarts.

Re-enable automatic system registry backup in Windows 11

As mentioned above, the Windows feature that automatically backs up the system registry upon system restart has been disabled.

Although this might be useful in some situations, if you need to recover a system with a corrupt registry hive, you should use a system restore point instead.

Here’s how to re-enable it in Windows 11.

First, open the Windows Registry, and navigate to the folder key path below.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Configuration Manager

If you don’t see the Configuration Manager folder key, right-click on the Session Manager key, then create the subkey (Configuration Manager) folders.

Right-click the Configuration Manager folder key’s right pane and select New -> DWORD (32-bit) Value. Next, type a new key named EnablePeriodicBackup.

Double-click the new key item name (EnablePeriodicBackup) and make sure the Base option is Decimal, and then update the Value data:

• To enable type: 1
• To disable it, type 0 or delete the registry item you created above.

Save your changes and restart your computer.

That should do it!

Reference:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-US/troubleshoot/windows-client/deployment/system-registry-no-backed-up-regback-folder

Conclusion:

This post showed you how to enable a Windows feature that automatically backs up the system registry upon restart. If you find any errors above or have something to add, please use the comments form below.