I am thinking of buying an external hard drive to store a lot of data / files from my laptop. My main question i is it as easy to transfer the data / files from the exteralhard drive back on to te laptop
They often come with "helpful" software that supposedly makes things easier, but I would ignore all that.
Chuck is right, the easiest way is drag and drop in Windows Explorer. It just becomes another drive there and you can create folders etc the same way you would on your main hard drive.