What do you backup before a reformat?

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SilentLunatic

Gawd
Joined
Oct 19, 2002
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Just wondering. I just installed a SSD into my laptop and kept nothing.

However my desktop is a totally different story.

Last time I remember reformatting and losing my steam game saves that didn't sync to the cloud.

I install a new 128GB Crucial M4 last night and cloned my old image to the new drive and it is performing horribly. So I guess its time for a secure erase and reinstall of 7-64.

Pictures, Videos, Music are stored on a separate drive.
 
I keep nothing on my SSD OS drive (or in the past, anything on the OS drive) that I cannot lose if I have to do an emergency format.

I have a separate drive for games and one for storage. I also move my page file and temp directories for Win7 (as well as the AppData for the Users directory) to the storage drive to keep writes to the SSD to a minimum.
 
I've started just making a clone of my SSD as a backup (in addition to a system image). I used to do a scheduled Win 7 backup for Libraries (and still do), but I wasn't sure it was getting all the save game data, etc, stashed away in the AppData folder (and other places) so I decided to just clone the thing and not have to worry about it. SSDs are so small relative to mechanical storage that it didn't make sense to mess around any longer. If I ever have a problem I can just dig down in the backup and find the files I'm looking for.
 
I don't specifically back up anything. I usually use MS Easy Transfer to save whatever it wants to save to an external drive. Then rebuild from scratch.

On the other hand, I have a Windows home server that backs up my machines every day and has 1 backup from each of the last 3 months, 1 backup from each of the last 3 weeks, and 1 backup from each of the last 3 days that I can restore from bare metal for every machine on my network, or pull into any client OS on my home network...

And three weeks of backups for all my virtual servers going to a second hard drive.
 
I just buy a new disk and toss the old one in an external enclosure.
 
not much, but I do backup my user folder every once in a while, since that is where all of my more useful data resides.
 
MrsOldMX said:
Nothing, thats the beauty of multiple hard disks.
Click to expand...
And folder redirection for a seamless desktop user experience :D

I use the separate hard disk (raid 1 set) for everything so when I wipe my ssd to reinstall, I don't have to back up anything.
 
bigdogchris said:
And folder redirection for a seamless desktop user experience :D
Click to expand...

this is the best thing to do when you have an ssd. changing the default location of the user accounts to a different drive is awesome. it saves you from crapping up your ssd and saves you time on a reformat.
 
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