
With Nvidia display drivers typically consuming 2 to 2.5GB per copy (or version), keeping older drivers around is a huge waste of space. You can keep two versions for safety if you like (simply uncheck the next-to-most-recent version after using RAPR’s Select Old Driver(s) option), but there’s no reason to keep more than two in the driver store. For a clean and tested deployment image, it should have only as many copies of any driver as it needs. (Before I started doing regular cleanups myself, I might find a dozen or more Nvidia display drivers on a PC with a one-to two-year-old OS image running.)
By policy, I schedule driver cleanups quarterly through a calendar reminder. In actual practice, I tend to check things more often than that. It’s not unusual for me to run RAPR after Patch Tuesday comes and goes, just to see what’s changed on my PCs. You can, of course, do as you like – just be sure to do this at least once or twice a year.
You really have to work at it to hurt yourself using RAPR, so you needn’t feel compelled to make an image backup before cleaning up your driver store. But because I’m a “belt-and-suspenders” kind of guy, I’ve gotten into that habit, just in case I accidentally remove something it turns out I really need. You can always reload that backup from the repair/recovery media for your PC if you wind up with a failing or unbootable machine after a too-aggressive cleanup. (Or you can mount the old image as a VM inside many backup utilities, such as Macrium Reflect Free, and pluck the drivers you need from that driver store using RAPR’s export and install tools.)
