Reinstalling WIndows 7 and Mods.

[LightThisCity22]

Hello all,

I just recently got an SSD(Solid State Drive) and I will be re-installing windows 7 64 bit. I backed up Skyrim via Steam to a separate backup drive. Do I need to do the same thing with NMM? My biggest fear is that I will restore my game and none of the mods are there anymore and all the moded gear that I smithed and improved will be gone along with all the extra content. Now, I am not lazy. I did look through the forums and found a post on this, but the person who answered this didn't seem quite confident in his answer to this question, which is why I am asking again. Can someone please clarify all I need to do before I go ahead with this process??

 

 

Thank you for your time.

[ChampionOfHircine]

What are you doing exactly? Are you installing Win7 to your SSD and reformatting your old drive? I've never done this before but here's what I'd do. If you have enough space on your SSD then you can just move your entire Skyrim folder and NMM mods folder to your SSD after installing Win7 (obviously before reformatting your old drive). I don't know anything about using Steam to backup but you could just move/copy the folders just as easily.

[Eckss]

ChampionOfHircine is correct, all your active Mods are held in your Skyrim/Data folder (Typical filepath is something like Steam/SteamApps/common/Skyrim/Data). Back this up and when you switch out your drive and install your OS, you can put them all back. If you want NMM to retain it's info, also backup your NMM Mods folder (Typical filepath is something like Nexus Mod Manager/Skyrim/Mods). This is where NMM stores the actual download files that come from Nexus before activating them. Also, your save files will already be backed up by the Steam Cloud, but if you want to be certain, they're kept along with your .ini files (Typical filepath is something like My Documents/My Games/Skyrim/Saves).

 

Once you've installed your OS, you'll need to install Steam and Skyrim on the new drive. Once that's done, look in your new Skyrim/Data folder and you'll see all the files that Steam Installed such as Skyrim.esm, Update.esm and any DLC you've got such as HighResTexturePack01.esp or Dawnguard.esm along with all associated .bsa files. You won't need to re-install any of these from your backup unless you've altered the originals in any way (such as by using TES5Edit on them). You can then restore your backed-up Mods, Saves and NMM data.

 

Happy Yuletide.

Eck. :D