I was just thinking as I'm new to PC gaming is there a way to back up your game save's to a USB stick or something like that the way you can with a xbox 360's Memory card.

a USB can work, also slave another drive, put the file on it, reformat the main one, then transfer to the main one

The savegames are located in My Documents\My Games or Documents\My Games.

Partition your Hard drive. OS on one data on the other. I got stuff on this HD dating back to 2003 and I know my XP product key by heart.

When I'm done doing a reformat how do I intergate the game saves with a fresh install of the game.

Alright. If you have a large enough USB device (I need 150GB for my Steam stuff). Just copy your entire Steam folder over to it. After you have done your OS reinstall just copy the USB stick back over to your Hard Drive. Now it's only a matter of finding your Steam application and starting it. After you are logged in all your games are back, but the GFX/Game-Play/sound settings will revert to defaults. I think the backup gizmo built into Steam blows chunks.

Saved games you want to also backup. Bethesda savegames can be found in "...Documents and settings\My Games" for XP. Vista and Windows 7 should be in the sameish place as well.

So do I just copy and past them into the steam folder.I'm not sure about how your explaining to get the game save's into the new install of the game.

don't copy all of it, that is really a waste of space, just copy your save games, unless you are slaving a hard drive, to do this you will need another hard drive, you don't necessarily have to buy one, you can just borrow one from someone, when I reformmated my pc I just used my sisters. If you need to know how to slave then you can look it up on google, its not necisarrily hard, just put the hard drive in and connect it (can remove pin in the imput, but you don't need to) and enter into bios and enable the drive. I have only done this twice, so I don't know that much about it.

I use a partitioned HD. OS lives on C drive and all my apps are on D drive. Got a external USB hard drive that holds mirrored copy of D Drive just in case and allows my to take all my steam games/Music/movies on the road with me.

Thanks for the advice so far guys but I don't think you guys are understanding what I'm asking,Ok so I have the game saves copy to a small flash drive now after the PC has been reformated how do I put the games saves into the fresh install of the game,it's putting the old saves into the new game I'm not sure about.

Remember where they were? Copy them to that exact same location.

Ok that makes sense Alois Hammer I just wanted to make sure how it has to be done as I have tried this method for other programs and not games and some programs are very fussy to make the old work woth the new.