A driver export is not a clone of your PC. Some things return exactly, some return because Windows itself carries them, and some never come back from an export at all. Knowing which group each item belongs to — before you format — is the whole game.
Technicians get bitten by the gap between 'I backed up the drivers' and 'the scanner software is gone'. The export captures driver packages from the driver store — nothing more, nothing less. This page sorts a whole machine into the three honest groups: what the backup holds, what Windows replaces by itself, and what you must arrange separately before the format wipes it.
The coverage map of a DISM or PowerShell driver export. Read your own machine against this list before formatting.
Everything staged as a third-party package in C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore: drivers the PC maker installed at the factory, drivers you installed from downloads, and the third-party drivers Windows Update delivered. Wi-Fi, LAN, Bluetooth, audio, chipset, storage, touchpad, fingerprint — if Device Manager is running a package that did not ship inside Windows, it exports.
This group restores perfectly, at exactly the versions currently installed. It is the group the whole backup exists for, and on most machines it is the difference between a one-hour reinstall and a one-day one.
Windows ships with a large in-box driver library: standard display output, generic USB and storage support, basic network classes, HID keyboards and mice, and more. DISM skips these during export for the simple reason that every fresh Windows install already contains them.
After the reinstall they are simply present again — nothing was lost, but also nothing needed restoring. This is why a healthy export has fewer folders than the total device count in Device Manager, and why that difference alone is not a sign of a bad backup.
Modern drivers arrive with a companion app, and the app is a separate program: Realtek Audio Console, the NVIDIA app and Control Panel, Intel Graphics Command Center, Killer or OEM control centers, hotkey and on-screen-display utilities, RGB tools. The export saves the driver underneath them; the app itself is not a driver package and is not in the folder.
The classic complaint — 'sound works but my equalizer app is gone' — is this group, working exactly as designed.
The print driver itself usually is a third-party package and exports fine, so the printer prints after the restore. What does not come back is everything around it: the scan suite, fax tools, ink monitors, and the vendor toolbox — all applications, all gone unless reinstalled.
Scanners are where this hurts most: a multifunction device that prints happily but cannot scan is the signature of a format done without this step.
BIOS updates and device firmware are not drivers at all. Firmware is written onto the hardware itself — an SSD or docking station you updated keeps its new firmware through any format. BIOS settings likewise stay in the firmware. Neither needs backing up, and neither can be restored from a driver folder.
Your settings inside apps are the opposite problem: they live in the old Windows and die with the format. Before wiping any machine, the honest checklist has two columns — drivers, which the export covers, and software and settings, which need installers, accounts, or exported preferences. The second column is where format-day surprises live.
Watch the export in the video, then walk your own machine through the three groups before you format it.
▶️ Watch Full VideoThe audio driver came back from your backup; the control app is a separate program and was never in it. Reinstall it from the Microsoft Store or from the laptop maker's support page for your exact model.
The third-party ones are, yes. Windows Update stages its driver packages in the same driver store, so they export with everything else — at the exact versions installed at the moment you ran the command.
If their packages are still staged in the driver store, yes. Windows keeps staged packages until they are removed, so a printer installed last year and rarely connected usually exports along with everything else.