What to backup when you are formatting your computer

I have an ASUS A6J laptop which I bought in April 2006. This is my first laptop that I have ever bought and I did great research for getting it. When every I decide to format my laptop I back up my entire hard disk to my 160GB WD portable hard disk. I made sure that I had all the utilities and softwares that I will need to install again when I have finished formatting. I backed up all of our photographs as on previous occasion I had formatted my laptop and forgot to backup the photographs from last week. Those photographs were of us inspecting our house that was getting built and was in slab stage. Those photographs were memory for life time but due to one stupid mistake, I wiped them out of our lives. After this instance my wife gave me the 160GB WD portable hard disk as a gift so that I never did this stupid thing again.

After I was satisfied that I have backed up everything, I formatted my laptop and when it was over, I started to install softwares. Everything went perfect and I was happy about my accomplishment. In the evening when my wife took the laptop to check her emails and websites, she looked at me with a question mark on her face. Then in a very sweet voice she asked me “Honey, when you format the laptop and reinstall Windows, do the bookmarks in the explorer get copied automatically?” I knew that was not a question for me to answer and was just to say that “Stupid, you wiped out all of my bookmarks”. After this, I have made a list of things that you need to backup and keep in a safe place before you start formatting your hard disk. The list is

• All important files (and not important files too, you will thank me later)
• Windows settings, remember them or write them down
• Check if you have driver CD (If not get them first before formatting)
• All relevant softwares and utilities
• Photographs
• Work documents
• Bookmarks from Internet explorer or Firefox
• Emails
• Email addresses
• Remember all your passwords or write them down somewhere
• Songs collection
• Movies collection
• Tutorial files (I generally download them as PDF for reading them later)