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#1
How and what to back up when reinstalling Windows 7
It's been a little over a year since I last installed Windows. I decided it was time to perform a clean installation. I just got my computer last year and I've never done it before. I have 2 hard drives, each 1 TB. My primary hard drive is partitioned. The first 882 GB is the Local Disk. It has everything on it, the OS, programs, data, etc. The other 48.8 GB has the Windows 8 pre-release installed on it. My secondary hard drive is used for backup. I use the default Windows backup program. I'm currently performing a backup and I plan on creating a system image after that. Once those finish, I'm going to partition my primary hard drive again for the new installation. How much space do I need to give Windows 7 on a partition?
I was also wondering what to do after reinstalling Windows. Do I restore from the system image? I thought reinstalling Windows then restoring would defeat the purpose, wouldn't it? Also, what do the backups and system images cover? Should I just manually copy my programs and data to the internal backup hard drive? I just that that moving programs from where they installed then moving them back might mess some things up. I read somewhere that it would be smart to reinstall all programs. I wouldn't mind doing that, but there's one that concerns me. I'm a PC gamer and I use Steam. My Steam folder is almost 200 GB, please tell me I wouldn't have to download all my my games again...
Well that's it for now, I can't think of the other questions I had. Basically I need a simple step by step tutorial on backing up programs and data and reinstalling Windows. Thanks!