The Real Deal: Question about backing up data

Question about backing up data

I suspect my laptop might be close to dying, so I'm a little more determined in my backup efforts lately.

For the most part, I'm pretty good at knowing what to backup, but I just want to be sure I'm not missing anything. I keep all my personal files in a folder directly in C:\ so that's all easy to backup.

A few extras I also backup (I made a list so I wouldn't forget) are fonts, themes, screensavers, and bookmarks, since those are stored elsewhere. I also keep a list of Firefox Addons and installed programs I have and use, so I can reinstall them all manually later. That's just my preference to do it that way. (And btw, I'm running Windows 7 Pro.)

Additionally, I just started using Picasa lately, with the face recognition, so I assume backing up my pictures from within Picasa will backup all of that information as well. Can anyone confirm that?

I also recently started using Outlook. No e-mail, just calendar, tasks, and notes. Can I just copy the .pst file? Does that contain all my data?

So.. am I forgetting anything important? I thought about backing up my AppData folder (actually, I am as of right now) but I don't know if that's really necessary, particularly since I prefer to manually reinstall everything from a fresh system anyway. I want to stop backing up AppData, but I wanna be sure that's safe. I'm okay with backing up specific folders within there, but backing up the whole thing seems like overkill.

Are there any other program specific things or anything else I should backup? Particularly with regards to Zune or Photoshop. (But post for any programs you can think of, for the use of anyone who checks this later.)

Also, if you read through this, but can't think of anything else, at least post and say that, please, so I can be more confident that I've got everything.

Thanks!

(And, not that it really matters, but the preview post is not showing the right screenname. I'm actually PandaSage1221.)