If you’re a web user, you know that it’s important to have a backup and restore solution in case your computer goes down. And if you’re an IE user, you probably also know about the Trusted Sites List (TSL). The TSL is a list of sites that IE trusts and will not allow you to access if your computer is down. You can add or remove sites from the TSL at any time by using the Add Site dialog box in IE or by using the Windows Update feature of IE. If you’re an IE user and your computer goes down, it’s important to have a backup and restore solution in place so that your favorite websites are still accessible. If you don’t have a backup and restore solution, then your website might be inaccessible when your computer comes back up.
Like most everything else in Windows, there’s a quick way you can do so in the registry by backing up a single key, which we’ll cover for you today.
What Are We Backing Up Again?
For those of you that don’t know what we’re talking about, if you go to the Security tab under Internet Options, you’ll see a Trusted sites icon in the list.
Selecting that icon and then the Sites button will bring up a dialog which will allow you to add or remove sites from the zone.
For the purposes of this example, I used a clean computer that only had howtogeek.com added to the list, which would be silly to backup via the registry… this should really be used for machines with a long list.
Backing Up Via Regedit
Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box and navigate down to the following key:
Right-click on the Domains key and choose Export, and then give the file a useful name. You can then transfer it over to any other computer you’d like.
Importing the Backup
This is as simple as double-clicking on the file on any machine that you want to restore that list on. Remember that it will potentially wipe out entries currently on that machine you are restoring over and replace them with the backup copy.
As you can see, I was able to take the backup file from my Vista machine and restore it onto my XP machine:
This is probably most useful for somebody in IT… easy way to add all the corporate web apps just once to the trusted sites list.
