Need to reinstall Word 2000 - How do I make a back-up of all of my files?

[Trudy]

I need to reinstall Word 2000. How do I make a back up of
everything I have saved? Then, how do I go about
reinstalling all of those files once I reinstall Word 2000?

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi, Trudy,

The page at http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/General/FilesToBackup.htm
describes which files you need.

As for "how", first close Word (and Outlook, if you use Word as your email
editor). Then you can use Windows Explorer, the Windows backup utility, or
any third-party backup program to copy the files. If you're going to do an
immediate reinstallation, it's enough to simply copy them to a new folder on
the hard drive. It's safer to write them to a second physical hard drive if
you have one, or to an external drive or solid-state USB ("thumb drive" or
"jump drive"), or to a CD-R disk, or to your ISP's personal web space. Use
floppies if that's the only removable media you have, using something like
WinZip's disk-spanning if necessary.

To restore, first finish the complete reinstallation. IMPORTANT: If you
didn't completely clean off the old installation, you'll find all the old
stuff (Normal.dot, registry entries, other templates you've modified, custom
dictionary) intact, because uninstall purposely doesn't remove things that
changed after the first installation. This is often what you want, but if
you're reinstalling to try to solve a problem you'll probably find that the
problem is still there, too! Besides, reinstallation is usually too
time-consuming, when all you really need is to rename or delete one or a few
files. See the first few articles in the Application Errors FAQ at
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/index.htm before you do anything else.

Anyway, once the reinstallation is done, just copy the backup files into
their original locations and then start Word. If you recorded a macro to
save your settings, run that macro.

 

[Rob Schneider]

I need to reinstall Word 2000. How do I make a back up of
everything I have saved? Then, how do I go about
reinstalling all of those files once I reinstall Word 2000?

Normally, reinstalling Word will not affect your documents.

That being said, it is prudent that you have backups of your documents
.... not to protecte necessarily from installing the application, but to
protect against hard disk failure, inadvertant deletion, etc.

To backup everything you've saved ... find it all, and copy to other
media, e.g. floppy disk, another hard disk, writable CD, etc. The key
is to find everything. Only you can do that. Use Explorer.

After finding stuff, consider using the Windows backup utility.
Instructions for that program included in it's Help file.