Just a quickie, chaps - whenever I set up a new install I move the users, prog files and progdata folders to the D: drive on the basis that should I need to reinstall Windows, I can do so over the C: drive without losing any data or settings. A thought just occurred to me though - if I did have to do this and followed the process through, deleting the above new folders from C: (and obviously reinputting the junctions etc. as prior), would everything still work, given the untouched, older folders on D: might be referencing a different registry? And so, is there any point in moving everythng over to D: at all? A lot can be found online espousing the benefits but it seems moot if nothing will work again afterwards. Thanks in advance!
The only things I back up are either pst/nk2 files (or dbx/wab) and the profile desktop/documents/favourites folders and possibly any stray files/folders on the root. I think you're right in that, if you were to restore, you'd have to reinstall programs anyway as they create registry entries.
Hmm...interesting. And thanks for getting back! I do backups using DriveImage XML (and might be switching to Acronis once I've tested it out), so I'm not too fussed about being able to restore from those. However, I do worry about what happens if I need to reinstall in the event of one of the images containing any issue ie. if a problem went unnoticed and any re-imaging just brought the problem back again. Or, as happened recently, I upgraded from XP to 7 and had to do a completely clean install. Then it's a chore to reload all the programs (but it sounds like I might have to anyway).
