Worried about having to reinstall W7?

Barso · 06 Jul 2010

I have W7 ultimate installed on my C drive with different utilities and all of my games including steam, about 60 games on my D drive.
But what worries me is if I have to reinstall W7 incase a problem arises that will need a reinstall. I know that all of my programs are tied to the registry and they will all need reinstalled too but is there anyway I can format my C drive, reinstall W7 and not have to reinstall all of the programs,games on my D drive?
Thanks for any help and replies, these forums are invaluable.

Bare Foot Kid · 06 Jul 2010

Hello Barso, welcome to Seven Forums!

Why don't you make a clone of Windows, have a look at the links below; be sure to post back to keep us informed.

Macrium Reflect FREE Edition

Imaging with free Macrium

DeaconFrost · 06 Jul 2010

If you have any concerns about the time it takes to reinstall, you should automcatically be using a driving imaging program. Macrium if a good one, but Windows 7 also has a good one built-in already. I store my images on my server, but I have one for my C drive. I don't back up my D drive per se, because all of my data files are backed up already.

60 games? Who the hell has time for that? I'm lucky if I have more than one installed at a time, and I don't even have kids yet.

eldinv · 06 Jul 2010

use macrium its amazing and will save you lots of time, if you do have to revert to an image backup. the windows built in backup is slower in terms of imaging and the backup images are larger.

richc46 · 06 Jul 2010

This is what I do

As soon as I install and am validated, I make a copy on an external Hard drive

Once a month I use System Image to make a copy on my internal drive

Most problems can be corrected with the current image.

In the event of a problem, like a virus or HD failure, I have my old copy to rely on.

Ztruker · 06 Jul 2010

I use Acronis True Image Home 2010 for my backup needs. I like Macrium and use it at work but I prefer ATI. It has built in scheduling capabilities, allows you to add a F11 prompt at boot to restore without a bootable CD and also has the ability to backup to a remote site on the internet. Also many other features but these are the main ones for me.

I do a daily backup to a 2nd internal hard drive and it's setup so after 10 backups, it merges the oldest two into one so I always have 10 days of backups to chose from. I could increase this but have not found it necessary.

For disaster recovery, I also backup to their internet site. I have 250GB of storage there and it costs me $49.95 a year. This is my Hurricane Insurance since I live on the Space Coast of Florida

HQuest · 06 Jul 2010

DeaconFrost said:

60 games? Who the hell has time for that? I'm lucky if I have more than one installed at a time, and I don't even have kids yet.

I had that much a couple years ago, back when I was a hardware and game reviewer. And when games did not took 35Gb disk space each (Hint: Cataclysm closed beta)