Question Clearing my hard drives.

[Diarmuidinskibb]

So recently I’ve been annoyed with how cluttered my PC has become with the amount of random stuff that has accumulated over the years and was thinking of completely clearing them.

I have 2 internal 1TB hard drives. Mainly use my PC for gaming so I want to be able to keep all the save files but not really sure how I would go about clearing the clutter without getting rid of some of the stuff I’ll need.

Really just looking for some guidance on where to start and avoiding some mistakes. Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Barty1884]

Really depends what you have vs what you want to keep.

One route you could consider is migrating all data you want to keep to a single drive and formatting the second.
OR
Consider a clean OS install. You can back up your steam library (and I assume Origin etc will have the same idea) so you don't have to download everything again.
A full wipe/reinstall would start you from a totally clean slate. No old driver leftovers, no registry errors etc... and, obvious, no unnecessary user files.

 

[popatim]

I suggest making an image of the drives in case you find that you missed out on saving some stuff.
I would save stuff to a Flash drive or just burn them to DVD's if you don't have any, then wipe the drive completely and then copy back in your saved stuff. Anything you missed should be in your image.

Just be careful as not all imaging software will allow you to restore items from within the image. With some it requires you to restore the whole image or nothing.

 

[jsmithepa]

In general, is not worth going through the exercise as HD space is relatively cheap.

So in order to preserve the stuff u need, you need to know what they are, where they are and typically people don't have the patience, the knowledge.