If I reformat my computer do I loose all my GW stuff?

Sorry if this question has already been answered, the search function on the forum is down.
I was planning to reformat my computer and have just wanted to know if you loose all your Inventory/Character if you reformat? I doubt your inventory and character are stored on servers so I take it that all the info would be held on your computer, in this case can I burn the GW files on a DVD and re copy them onto the HD after the formatting?

Or can I copy the files to a DVD, do a fresh install of GWs once the computer is reformatted and then overwrite the new files with the old ones from the DVD, will this let me jump right back in? I would be doing this cause of all the registry stuff that needs to be installed by the cds

Also, I saw a client download on the main site, does that do anything?

Everything about your in game character are stored on gw's servers. Reformatting youll only lose stuff that you redownload when you enter towns or areas. Dont worry about it. Since if gotten gw ive reformatted about 5 times

You won't "loose" anything, as a matter of fact, you won't LOSE anything, either.
The only thing you will lose are video settings for the game (resolution, quality, Anti-aliasing) which you will set again when you run GW the first time after the reinstall.

The client download on guildwars.com is the newest build of GW. You can install form the CD or use that file.

I just reformatted yesterday to fix some weird issue where songs would not play correctly in Winamp while I was in a game such as Guild Wars. I've partitioned my drives, and have a rather big storage partition seperate from my O/S so this was a rather easy thing for me. However, if you copy out the Guild Wars folder (which consists of like 4 files) to a partition or media that is not located with the O/S, after the format you can simply put it all back. That way you don't have redownload 'everything' again, which does take time and bandwidth. My DAT file for Guild Wars is sitting nicely around 1.4GBs, thus I'm rather glad I didn't have to re-download everything.

One of the things I absolutely love about this game is the ability to access your characters and play from any computer that has the client installed.

Thanks a lot everyone for their responses. Takes some stress off my shoulders knowing that all the chracters info is stored on ArenaNet's servers. Appreciated the quick replys.