I'm going for a clean install of my laptop now, since I want only one partition, and I want to not install a lot of crap that did my compy many, many wrongs. Anyways! I have approx. 35 GB to backup; I have plenty of DVD discs to do so; but I want a quick way to split the files across the discs so I don't have to manually arrange the file lists on all of them, and have problems finding everything later. Any way to do so?

PS: External hard drives are out of the question, I'm pretty broke. Ice cream doesn't sell much when summer starts ending =P

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Errm, So basically you want to chop WHOLE files, into pieces, so that you can put them on Disks?

If the answer to the above question is yes, Heres what you need:

File Cutter free download. This tool cuts files into smaller parts for copying to floppies or internet transfers. Create an easy-to-use batch file for automatic combination of p...

Enjoy ^_^

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Pretty broke as in... actually broke? Because you can get a decent external hard drive for like $70, give or take, and it would make the entire thing much simpler.

Another alternative is to use another computer. Are you on a network? You can setup a shared folder on the second computer and just copy everything over that you want to keep.

Another alternative is if you have one or two large USB keys. I have a 16GB one. If you can transfer the data temporarily to a friend's computer, and then store the rest on the key, you should be good to go.

As for copying them to DVDs... I would recommend manually copying the data to the DVDs and then label them. That's what I would do. Even if you don't actually fill each DVD, they'd be organized and copying the data back after your installation would be a lot easier. Although, in my experience, I would not recommend copying that much data to DVDs. The failure rate is too high for me to trust it. Seriously, if you can, consider investing in an external hard drive; it will make your life a lot easier.

If you absolutely cannot get an external hard drive, then try a friend's computer or something to temporarily store the data, but don't rely on DVDs. Being a laptop should make that a lot easier, as you don't have to lug around a PC.

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"America prays for God to destroy its enemies. Our enemies pray for God to destroy America. Somebody's going to be disappointed! Somebody's wasting their fucking time! Could it be.... everyone?!"
- George Carlin

I see. Thanks for the input. To get to my reply: Broke as in, I have some money, but not any I'm allowing myself to spend right now. I'm still paying for this very laptop, and with ice cream being my job and winter coming, I don't wanna be caught without any cash at all. I'll try the compy method, I'll go to a friend's place sometime and do it.

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That's your best solution then. A friend of mine did that. Brought her computer to my place, copied all her stuff to my server and then we reinstalled her computer and copied it all back. The whole process was under two hours. With the amount of data you want to back up, just the backing up part will take several hours.

(I thought you were kidding about the ice cream)

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"America prays for God to destroy its enemies. Our enemies pray for God to destroy America. Somebody's going to be disappointed! Somebody's wasting their fucking time! Could it be.... everyone?!"
- George Carlin

Haha no, I work there xD and yeah I guess I'll go to my friend's place, back it up and install it. Actually, about 20 of those gigs are one TV show I downloaded, I should just split that into DVDs and backup the rest at my friend's place. That would be a good idea xDD

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external hard drives ftw <333
when you get money, get one. seriously.

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I'll do that, but right now I'm a little tight on cash haha.
I have another question, how should I partition the hard drive? I have 149 GB, right now they're split into 40 GB (Vista Partition) and 109 GB aside for everything else.
I know this was a stupid way to do it, which is why I'm asking how I should do it =P
Also, should I have a recovery partition or something and if so, how do I achieve that? I'm using Vista.

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I don't think that was stupid at all. I always use a separate hard drive for my operating system. I would use a 40GB drive (that's all you really need) but you cannot buy them nowadays. If you're installing a lot of software you may want to increase the Vista partition since a lot of stuff is still written to the C: drive.

Not sure about the recovery partition, but I think it's just an image of the barebones installation of the computer, and you use imaging software to push it to the operating system partition when you want to reinstall. I wouldn't worry about it.

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"America prays for God to destroy its enemies. Our enemies pray for God to destroy America. Somebody's going to be disappointed! Somebody's wasting their fucking time! Could it be.... everyone?!"
- George Carlin

Buy a outside HDD.

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Yeah I think I'd just keep like 60-70 GB for Vista and the rest for media, and install my common and important apps to the Vista drive and such. That way I could easily arrange what I want correctly.

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clearly you don't even read the full post.

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