How do I Archive format my macbook Pro?

[MacBookPro2.4]

Hey you guys
im just wondering how to archive format my macbook pro 2,4 ghz with leopard.
I need all my stuff on it and it would take too long to back up on a hard drive, and i heard in a apple store that you can archive format your Mac
but, i dont know how

My problem is , when i click on downloads(folder) my mac somehow gets stuck and crashed (everysingletime) the same happens when i open steam and want to play counter strike ( i use crossover) so i think reinstalling leopard would be the best idea

Specs 2,4GHZ macbook pro, osx leopard with 2gb ram 15,4 inch

 

[Phil A.]

Wirelessly posted (iPod touch 32GB: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5G77 Safari/525.20)

If you need all your stuff, you should be backing up regularly anyway! Time machine would easily do an initial backup overnight and you are then protected...

 

[MacBookPro2.4]

Time machine

Wirelessly posted (iPod touch 32GB: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5G77 Safari/525.20)

If you need all your stuff, you should be backing up regularly anyway! Time machine would easily do an initial backup overnight and you are then protected...

if i use time machine for the first time now and back it up, will everything work after i formated my whole disk?

 

[Phil A.]

Wirelessly posted (iPod touch 32GB: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5G77 Safari/525.20)

Wirelessly posted (iPod touch 32GB: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5G77 Safari/525.20)

If you need all your stuff, you should be backing up regularly anyway! Time machine would easily do an initial backup overnight and you are then protected...

if i use time machine for the first time now and back it up, will everything work after i formated my whole disk?

Yeah - one of the options during install is to restore from a time machine backup. Also you get the option to restore a user from a time machine backup during initial setup

 

[MacBookPro2.4]

Thanks

thank you very much for the quick help dude