There's a sure fire way to make sure you miss nothing, no matter where it may be hiding on your hard drive - clone the drive.
Another advantage is that if your internal hard drive fails, you can replace it with the external drive (extracted from its enclosure, and assuming it's the same form factor and physical interface) and boot off it as if nothing had happened.
It's easy: get an external hard drive the same size (or larger). Get any recent Linux distro's LiveCD and burn to CD (it's free). Plug in the external hard drive, boot from said LiveCD, open a terminal and issue the following commands:
Code:
su -
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
If it takes a long time (as it might with a USB2 drive) then leave it running overnight - it'll be done by morning.
The only thing you need to check first is the identity of the targets, so I'll explain what they are:
if is the Input File, which, in this command, is assigned to device
sda, the first hard disk detected.
of is the Output File, which, in this command, is assigned to device
sdb, the second hard disk detected.
Your system will detect the hard disks in the same order each time and 99.9% of the time the internal hard disk will be
sda, but it pays to check. There's usually a Disk Utility to tell you the parameters of each disk device or you can simply look at what's on them - as long as you can confirm that sda is your internal drive, you're good to go.
(There's a very small chance that your system could reverse the order of the drive designations, so it's possible, however unlikely, that you could wipe everything instead of backing up. Hey, with great power comes great responsibility. Of course, if you want to wimp out and buy Windows software to do this, then I suppose that's another way to go.)