[Hodgy Beats]

I'm planning on formatting my hard drive, and reinstalling Windows due to possible RAT's, and virus infections. I'm also reinstalling just for the sake of clearing out space on my hard drive. The thing is, I know that many RAT's and Trojan's have USB spread. How do I back up important data to a flash drive safely, before reinstalling.

[SoulByte]

USB spread does not work very well on Windows Vista and later. However if you have executable(.exe) files on the drive they can have been infected.

First thing you should do is to make sure that you can see hidden operating system files.
Check for a file called "autorun.inf" inside the USB drive. This file shouldn't be there unless you placed it there yourself, it's for automatically executing programs when you plug the USB in.
Simply delete the file if it's there.

And of course, scan your USB drive for viruses using your preferred anti-virus.