

Since most of the games were on Steam, I used the Steam backup feature to back up the games to my second drive. The video games were also stored on the system drive. Since I have a second hard drive, I choose instead to just move the source code to that drive where it would not be affected by the rebuild.

This doesn’t really matter since all projects have a remote repository, I just needed to check for any work in progress and push those changes. Since all source code was stored on the system hard drive, it would be wiped when I reinstalled Windows.

The only exceptions included source code and video games. However, most of the files are stored in the cloud so no backup was necessary. My system includes documents, photos, videos, games, code, and other important files – I use it for everything. The initial preparation just required backing up important files before I wiped the drive and reinstalled Windows. In this post, I’ll describe the steps I used to rebuild my system, and the changes I made along the way to ensure future rebuilds will be easier. I was noticing some performance and stability problems, and a fresh start was long overdue. This week, I decided to rebuild my development environment.
