help with reinstall

[Bartek Skorupa]

I think that you haven’t got any answer to your question till now, because no one wants to take risk saying: “Don’t worry, just kill your c drive, and you’ll be fine”. I am also not going to say anything like that, but as far as I know – you can do it. There is no problem when you just take your project to another computer, so what problems can you have if you reinstall everything, and open projects, that exist on other drives? In my opinion you shouldn’t worry.
What I can say to you is that I have changed computers several times. I made several back ups of my projects. I have tonnes of old data. I can easily open my 3 or 4 years old projects even though the computers they were created on don’t exist anymore. I switch from mac to PC and vice versa. Projects created on ancient versions of AE open till now. What can I say? Kill your c drive and don’t worry, but don’t sue me if something goes wrong. Not my fault. I’m just giving my opinion.

Bartek Skorupa
Warszawa, Poland

[Chris Wright]

The Preference folder is located inside your AE folder, so before nuking the c:, you will want to back up that file as well. It won’t be compatible with a newer verion of AE so don’t upgrade or downgrade after the reinstall. As for other files, AE seems to contain everything it needs in the *.aep. Sure there’s temp files, but those just speed up audio renders and such. I’ve never seen AE fail from reintroducing original files after a wipe.