[Drizzy‎‎]

Long story short, friend's dad asked me to get EVERYTHING off of his (deceased) son's laptop so he can have a backup of everything on it. He doesn't want a backup of the whole hard drive, just pictures, documents, etc. Now the reason I'm asking is because as I said, his son is unfortunately not alive anymore so I want to make sure I do this correctly. What would be the most efficient and thorough way of doing this? Or is the only way to do it is manually?

I'll be backing everything up to a SD card if that matters.

[big dick rick]

external harddrive is what I'd go for.

[Drizzy‎‎]

external harddrive is what I'd go for.

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I'm asking if there's a certain program or something that automates this task?

[Freebooter]

The Acronis True Image is one of the best and fast backup software its not free software but money well spend in my view.

[datguy.dev]

I don't think there exists an automated software solution because you can't simply decipher a random person's family photo from a thumbnail. A W2 doc from a random configuration file.

Manually, all the casual use data a given user generates is in C:\Users\x. Where x is the user's folder that has the Pictures library etc. You can use Windows Explorer to do a search by owner. In the search bar type "type:image" or "type:folder" etc. Then right click in explorer, sort by..., more. Then scroll down and tick owner. You can apply that to other type of files. Check for other volumes. Use diskpart and check for hidden partitions. Use Magic Jelly Bean key finder to find software keys.

As for moving the files, check out Teracopy. It has built in error checking, like hashing 2 files.

I would suggest saving this data onto two separate SD cards - 1 for a backup. Making a system image and burning it to a CD just encase.

[EliteTM]

Personally I would backup the entire computer first. Then find all the documents, pictures and videos and etc after. Almost all external hard drive manufacturers will give you a copy of their version of a backup program. I know on my Seagate Backup External Hard Drive it came with a program to search your entire computer for documents, pictures and etc. I personally don't trust those types of programs. Hence why I said to backup the entire computer incase the program crashes and corrupts the external drive (or SD cards), or it could miss a single file or picture. If you do manually move everything, do *(file extension name) and kind:(pictures/music/video or whatever). Or you could use one of the backup programs included with most external hard drives and then doing a last check over to make sure everything is off that laptop.