How to tell if all my important stuff is backed up to external hard drive

[Guest]

I want to upgrade one of my Vista Laptops to see how I get on how would I know without checking everything individually if all my important stuff is backed up first onto my external hard drive
thanks.

[Guy]

Assuming you have a large external drive the easiest way is to simply copy everyting from your existing drive to a file on you external drive.
Create a new file called Backup2016 and copy the whole of your existing internal drive to that.

That way you will have copies of things you may not even have thought of.

Cheers
Guy

[Guest]

thanks very much Guy brilliant idea.