reformating your computer

[MiroslavGlavic]

I feel like sharing my situation:

How often do you do it?

I have this computer for 2 years. It's on XP, got some nasty browser highjack issue and then it rebooted then the windows XP wouldn't finish loading, it would be in that loop.

I was going to reformat anyways, what I forgot to do is to back up all my photos/videos/music/documents/etc...

I also lost my nero essentials 7.

I had to use IE to download my firefox. ew to IE.

I had all the perfect settings, all the perfect add-ons and passwords were remembered, I haven't done so much LOST PASSWORD clicking than I have in the past week.

Oh yeah, I can't find my HP deskjet printer disc, thus downloading the drivers right now and installing it.

I am the type that likes the way things are and know all the keyboard/mouse moves to do my things. I hated that I had to re-install Thunderbird and re-install 88 e-mail accounts. argh. many of those are the admin@ accounts from client websites.

By the way all my software has been 100% legal.

I had my icons on my desktop set a specific way, I liked that, now I have to spend the next week installing the apps again (in between work).

[chipbennett]

This is one of the reasons I *love* Linux.

My /home folder is a separate partition, and has ALL of my per-user configuration settings, as well as all of my documents, etc.

I backup my /home partition to a NAS drive share. If I ever have to reformat/reinstall (as I opted to do with my most recent Kubuntu upgrade), getting back to "normal" is as simple as copying everything back into my /home directory.

As far as apps go: that's also as simple as one single command-line entry:

sudo apt-get install *list of apps*

I still maintain/support a bunch of Windows machines (my wife's, my parents' , in-laws, etc.). I'm so glad I don't have to deal with that hassle with my own laptop anymore.

[curtismchale]

I can't speak to how to recover all of your little settings but a backup system for files I do have. I use Genie Timeline to backup all of my files as I build them then Mozy to push backups offsite as well.

If you moved to LastPass for password management or KeePass with the DB stored in a Dropbox account you could at least have all of the passwords still.

[Otto]

I had XP running continuously, with no hacks or speed problems or need to reformat, for about 6 years.

I shut that box down only because the fan died while I was away and the memory burned up.

The notion that you need to clean or reformat every so often is simply false. Don't install crap to begin with, and you won't have crap all over the place.

[Rarst]

My current WinXP install runs for several years (including ~2 years of 24x7 with uptime in multiply months between reboots) and got through two (three?..) hardware changes, including recent move to SSD.

WinXP SP3 is extremely stable. Maybe not server-grade but it doesn't get more stable than that for home/office use.

[Ryan]

We have a Windows 95 machine at my work which I used in 2003. When I came back to that machine in 2005 I realised that I'd forgotten to shut down Hotmail. People could still see my inbox as no one had closed the browser window (some crazy old version of Opera) in the past two years! The machine is still there and it's still turned on. Somebody may have rebooted it in the past four years, but I doubt it.

We also have a Windows 3.1 machine that I've seen sitting there for at least 12 months before too. When I came back, the window I was using was still open.

[andrea_r]

The notion that you need to clean or reformat every so often is simply false. Don't install crap to begin with, and you won't have crap all over the place.

Yep, totally agreed. The kid's computer is the only Windows box in the house. We haven't reformatted a computer in... uh... well, they have Win XP. We have a partition and an extra hard drive. Windows in on C, if you wanna install soemthing, do it on D. The kids are trained.
Whenever we would upgrade computers, we'd pop the old drive as an extra in the new one. Got stuff from the 90's on there.