Question about W10's refresh but keep user data

[modernwar99]

Been having many problems with my win10 installation (upgraded from 8.1). I want to use win10's new refresh feature (complete restore without the disk since my win10 is an OTA upgrade) except preserving personal documents. Now, I have too many files to put them on a small 160GB backup drive. My important documents and pictures are already on it, but I don't have room for all my steam games and music.

My question is, can I throw all my files/folders I want to save in the "Documents" folder so that they are preserved through the factory reset? Basically like copying my whole "Program Files x86" folder into my documents for preservation (maybe not that extreme, but that's the idea I'm getting at). Or will they get wiped anyways?

Edit: Yes I know that most programs won't work after the reset because the registry will be wiped, but I'm mainly concerned about the steam games and the save data for those games so I don't need to spend days downloading them again. Have copied game folders between computers before and steam automatically fixes the registry for those games.

 

[thor220]

A factory restore will wipe all data on the drive. A refresh will preserve user data. In either case I would move the data to another drive. Windows 10 is still newish and has many bugs. You don't want your data to be in one of them.

You can delete the steam games as they are easy to redownload. Music should take much space at all.