Oh, for the good ol' days, when stuff like QuarkXpress fit on two floppies — one more than the entire system.
jacintosh, you could keep it simple and back up stuff like your bookmarks and other files (and even your library folder) by burning them to a DVD or CD or two or three. Let the apps/OS take care of themselves with their install disks.
Reinstalling, though, is an education in itself, and the more often you do it, the easier and faster it goes (you can experiment by not doing a so-called easy install. Pick and choose to save space, like not checking off Lower Slobobian and Greek Linear B, or whatever.
So if you have the time and the inclination, do it all again. But this time, partition the disk, and put all your saved files of whatever persuasion on the other partition, better isolating the system files and apps (in their own partition) from possible corruption, because that partition would be hardly written to by you (and it would help to keep system-file fragmentation to a minimum).
FWIW, I've done it that way since System 7, though fragmentation was a bigger deal before OS X. But backing up would be easier, too, for example if you keep your mp3s or whatever on the second partition. If iTunes goes south, it's far less likely your music files will, too. Using mp3s as the example again, it's far easier to drag a folder full of them to a backup, then back to the second partition than it is figuring out where they are and chasing them down — if they still exist — after an iTunes meltdown. But if that happened, they'd be untouched on the other partition, anyway. (In this case, don't allow iTunes to move any files into its own folder.)
One in the System folder, which is off-limits and read-only; one for the hard-drive, one somewhere else (sorry, I've been too long away from OS X & I'm asleep at the keyboard); and one in your log-in folder, which is the one you can fiddle with.
