What's best way to backup before format & install windows xp?

barnettgs

barnettgs

barnettgs

Soldato
Joined
22 Jan 2005
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N Ireland
My files in My Documents is about 16GB. I have firefox and messages in outlook express. I haven't format my computer for over one and half years and I think it's time to do reformat & fresh install.

I know there is File & Settings Transfer Wizards but with 16GB, is second HDD only way to do? I don't have any spare HDD at the moment.

What do you recommend me to do?

Thanks in advance
 
For the future, partition or spare drive and just copy my docs, export a pst from outlook and copy favourites and gamesaves to a directory on that partition or alternate drive, it's what I do.

Cheers,

SoulJah
 
I tend to just copy the whole of the C Drive onto a spare disk - or (usually) I upgrade the disk anyway - so my current C Drive just becomes my D Drive.

I then import the mail, copy the docs I want, archive the rest to blank CDs/DVDs.

I find this really useful - you install an app and need your settings, config details etc from when you used to have it - well they will be in D:\Program files\app name
After I havent touched the D Drives data in a few months, I delete it.
 
Thanks for some replies.

My second HDD of 20GB broke down a couple of years ago so I thought there might be other way to backup but it's obvious that I need to buy a cheap 2nd HDD for ease of backup rather than taking too long buring to some DVDs.

At the moment, I already have two partitions on one 120 GB drive - C drive has 20GB but sometimes it needs defragmenting more often than needed due to lack of free space.

Cheers
 
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