wrong and keep it on a separate drive? Then if need be you can delete that file and copy the backup back to your main drive. Will this work? Will this somehow conflict with the roaming file and should I make a copy of that as well and copy and paste both of these in their respective places. From the backup on I will keep track of any new addons I install. Thanks
i keep a backup of all sorts of blender bits that ive customized, from the UI to addons to settings.
i definitely keep a backup of the stuff in “appdata/roaming/blender” so whenever i reinstall windows routinely i get to keep all of my settings and starter file. there is no adverse effect in doing this.
Thanks Daedalus_MDW, I appreciate your quick reply.
Like Daedalus, I backup everything, one of the things I love about Blender is you can just move it from drive to drive. I always use the zip version of a relase and just unzip and run, makes it easier to shift releases and know which areas I can tidy up.
Just for the sake of completeness:
You can even forget about the roaming files and make Blender really selfcontained by just creating a folder called “config” in /path_to_blender/2.79/.
This way you can even have multiple configs going.
A lot of people seem not to know this…
I think it would be logical to try to avoid keeping customized bits in the Program Files Blender folder as much as possible so you do not accidentally lose stuff when updating to new versions, but it’s hard to do that if one wishes to quickly modify a plugin that comes with Blender or change something in the UI code. I end up needing to backup bits from Program Files folder as well. But if you are not keeping something that you spent time on customizing there, there is really no need to back it up. It’s really easy to reinstall if you brake something - takes only a few minutes. So I think it would be logical to try to use it in a way where you only need to backup the %appdata%\Blender Foundation\Blender folder, but it’s sometimes not that easy 
.
That’s the point in creating that folder. You won’t loose anything because you don’t overwrite/replace/share any data between versions. Blender never was intended to be “installed”. This way it’s truly portable.
If your concern is safety of your config, just make a copy of your Blender folder to which you can rollback. With a config stored at a single arbitrary space chances are much higher to overwrite something. Another cool thing: You can avoid addon incompatibility by having addon A enabled in one Blender and addon B in another.
Anyways I think it boils down to a matter of taste. And again another example of whats the meaning of Blender is free to use.