Quote from “The Ultimate Guide to Reinstalling Windows From Scratch by David Murphy”

Quote from “The Ultimate Guide to Reinstalling Windows From Scratch by David Murphy” on https://lifehacker.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-reinstalling-windows-from-scratch-1832897572

Preserve whatever you don’t want to download later

I’m lucky, in that I can dump most of my critical files (my games) across a few secondary hard disk drives and SSDs on my desktop PC. I don’t do this for the speed or capacity boosts (my primary drive, a 500GB SSD, would be overwhelmed by my Steam collection, whereas my secondary 2TB drive is perfect for my pile o’ games). I also do it because it’s a lot easier to reinstall Windows 10 when I don’t have to worry about reinstalling hundreds of gigabytes worth of games, too.

If you can, I recommend keeping your games off your primary hard drive whenever possible. In my case, I dump everything I can easily redownload onto separate drives. That includes games on Steam, Battle.net, Origin, Epic Games, GoG, et cetera.

Make a backup once you’ve finished the basics
Once you have a general version of Windows 10 set up to your liking—all your preferences are set and all the regular programs you use are installed—I think it’s a great idea to image your entire installation before you start downloading a bunch of crap from the web or what-have-you.
Go grab Macrium Reflect and create a backup image of your entire C:\ drive, assuming that’s where you installed Windows and your programs. This way, you’ll have a great “operating system + everything I like” version of Windows that you can use the next time you want to restore your system back to a “clean” version of the OS.