Storing your back up on another drive is good.  That way if your primary drive fails you are covered.  I also go one step further and copy mine to the cloud.  That way if there were to be a fire, flood, etc I have a copy off site.
While you don't need it as often, unless you are making lots of changes,  you should be backing up your front end as well.

Looking for some notes is kind of a good thing.  It gives you an opportunity to test how to restore your database.  
1.  Make a new folder some where on your computer.  
2.  Make a copy of your front end and a copy of your back end that you want to look at into that temp folder.
3.  Open the FE copy in the temp folder.  It may or may not error out depending on how your drive path is set up.
    In either case you need to relink the FE copy to the BE copy in the temp  folder.

Check out the Relink Tables if you are not certain how to do that.

BTW - If you are not used to doing this, you might want to take good notes and keep them in your back up drive. That way if you have an issue you have something to go back and look at.  Future you would be really grateful you thought ahead.

Doesn't have to be fancy. You could start out by copying this post into note pad and adding to it.  You could also save screen shots as pictures if you think it will help you.

See Disaster Recovery!
and
Backup Access

Good luck!  Holler if you need help.

Backups should preferably be saved on a DIFFERENT computer somewhere else instead of on another drive of the same computer.  Don't make the same mistake Francis Coppola did ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/sep/29/argentina.film ).  The thief not only stole his computer, but also the backup drive right next to the computer.

At a minimum, there should be three copies of your important files in three different places: in your computer, in a backup drive at a remote site, and an online backup copy.

Thank you  so much! This is the information that I needed! Found the notes!
Mary Franklin

Great news.  Good job on having backups to go back to.  You wouldn't believe how many people don't.