What to Back Up Before a Windows Factory Reset
Short answer
Copy your user folder (Documents, Desktop, Downloads, Pictures, Videos) to an external drive, then collect the things that live outside it: browser bookmarks and saved passwords, software licence keys, two-factor authenticator codes, Outlook PST files and app save data. Then open several files from the backup and confirm they work before you reset anything.
On this page
Most people back up their documents folder, reset the machine, and then spend the following fortnight discovering things. The saved Wi-Fi passwords. The authenticator app. The licence key for the software they bought in 2021 from a company that no longer exists.
The documents folder is the easy part. What costs you is everything stored somewhere you never had to think about, which is most of the things an operating system does on your behalf.
A factory reset is irreversible. Work through the list below before you go anywhere near the Recovery screen.
Start with the obvious, and be systematic
Plug in an external drive and copy the whole of your user folder rather than
picking through it. It lives at C:\Users\<yourname> and contains:
- Documents
- Desktop — the files sitting on it are real files in this folder
- Downloads — people treat this as temporary and then keep things there for years
- Pictures, Music, Videos
- Saved Games
Press Win+R, type %userprofile% and press Enter to open it directly.
One caution about OneDrive. If your Documents, Desktop and Pictures folders have been moved into OneDrive’s backup — which Windows 11 offers during setup and many people accept without noticing — those folders sync and will come back. But files set to Online-only are not stored on the machine, so copying the folder copies placeholders rather than content. Right-click the OneDrive folder and choose Always keep on this device before you copy, and wait for the sync to finish.
The files that live outside your user folder
These are the ones that cause the trouble, because nothing warns you about them.
| What | Where to find it | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Outlook mail data | %localappdata%\Microsoft\Outlook |
PST and OST files holding local mail, contacts and calendar |
| App data and settings | %appdata% and %localappdata% |
Game saves, editor configurations, chat histories |
| Game saves | Documents\My Games, Steam userdata, %appdata% |
Varies wildly by game; many are not in the cloud |
| Custom fonts | C:\Windows\Fonts |
Anything you installed yourself |
| Files outside your profile | Second drives, C:\ root, custom folders |
A reset can clear all drives if you select that |
The %appdata% and %localappdata% folders are large and mostly disposable, so
copying them wholesale is wasteful. Go into each and copy the folders belonging
to applications you care about: your password manager’s local vault, your
editor’s configuration, a chat client’s history, a game’s save directory.
Press Win+R and type the path to open either folder.
Browser data: bookmarks, passwords and the rest
Browsers store everything in a profile you never see, and signing in to a browser account covers less than people assume.
If you use browser sync, confirm it has actually synced before the reset rather than assuming. In Chrome, open Settings and check the sync status reads as up to date, not paused. Sync that has been silently paused for months is common and nobody notices until the data is gone.
Export the bookmarks regardless. Chrome and Edge: Bookmarks → Bookmark manager → the ⋮ menu → Export bookmarks, which produces a single HTML file. Firefox: Bookmarks → Manage bookmarks → Import and Backup → Export Bookmarks to HTML.
Passwords need deliberate handling. Both Chrome and Edge can export saved passwords to a CSV file from the password manager settings. That file is plain text and readable by anyone who finds it, so keep it on the external drive, use it to import afterwards, and delete it the moment you have. A proper password manager with its own account is the better long-term answer precisely because this step stops being necessary.
Also worth capturing: browser extensions you use, which do not sync their configuration reliably.
Licences, keys and accounts
The category most likely to cost money to replace.
- Software licence keys. Check your email for purchase confirmations and save them to a file. Where an application shows its key in an About or Account screen, record it now.
- Deactivate licensed software before the reset. Adobe, Microsoft 365 and many professional tools limit the number of machines an account can activate, and a reset without deactivating burns one of your slots until support releases it.
- Your Windows licence needs nothing — it is tied to the hardware and reactivates automatically. Linking it to your Microsoft account beforehand (Settings → System → Activation) only matters if you later change the motherboard.
- Two-factor authenticator codes. The one that locks people out of their own accounts. If your authenticator app lives only on this machine, export its accounts or transfer them to your phone first, and print the recovery codes each service offers. There is no recovering these after the wipe.
Settings you will have to rebuild by hand
These cannot be backed up in any useful sense, so write them down.
Wi-Fi passwords. The reset clears every saved network. Before you start, recover the ones you no longer remember — how to find a saved Wi-Fi password covers reading them out of Windows. Guest networks, a neighbour’s network, the office, your parents’ house.
Printer and scanner setup. Model numbers, and any network addresses for printers connected over Wi-Fi.
Email account settings. If you use anything other than a major webmail provider, record the incoming and outgoing server names, ports and encryption settings. Hunting for these on an obscure provider’s support pages is a tedious afternoon.
VPN and remote access configuration. Server addresses, certificates and profile files.
Your installed application list. Take a screenshot of Settings → Apps → Installed apps, or run this in Terminal and save the output:
winget listIt will not reinstall anything by itself, but it means you are not reconstructing your setup from memory three weeks later.
Verify the backup before you touch anything
This is the step that separates a reset from a disaster, and it takes five minutes.
Open the backup drive and actually open files from it. Not the folder listing — open a document, view a photo, play a few seconds of a video. Check the folder sizes roughly match the originals.
Common failures that only reveal themselves here: a copy interrupted partway through, a drive that filled up silently, files that were online-only placeholders rather than real content, and an external drive with a developing fault.
If the data genuinely matters, keep two copies in two places. A single external drive is a single point of failure, and the moment you discover it has failed is precisely the moment you have nothing else.
What you do not need to back up
Copying these wastes hours and achieves nothing.
- Program Files. Installed applications do not work when copied back. They need reinstalling. Keep the keys, not the folders.
- Windows system folders.
C:\Windowsis rebuilt by the reset. - Temporary files and caches. They regenerate. Which Windows temporary files are safe to delete covers what they are if you are curious.
pagefile.sysandhiberfil.sys. System files with no value off the machine.- Files already in a cloud service that is genuinely syncing. Verify it, then leave it.
What afterwards actually looks like
A properly prepared reset means spending an evening reinstalling applications and signing back into things, not a fortnight of discovering losses. The reinstalling is tedious and expected; the discoveries are the part that hurts.
If the reset is in preparation for a sale rather than a fresh start, the backup is only half the job — the other half is making sure nothing of yours is left behind, which is covered in how to wipe a PC before selling it.
And if you are mid-panic because the reset has already happened, the honest answer is that a reset with data cleaning enabled leaves nothing to recover. A plain reset sometimes leaves data retrievable by recovery software — stop using the machine immediately if so, because every further write reduces the chance.