I moved the storage location to a partition on my local hdd where I keep all my data so it’s easier to backup.
If I, say, do a clean install of Windows or restore a disk image where eM client didn’t exist.
Would I still need to copy the files from the previous location?
No, the original location does not contain the database, so you don’t need to copy it.
One thing to note about backups. If you are using an external application to backup the eM Client database, you need to ensure that eM Client is not running when the backup runs otherwise you will likely end up with empty files in the backup.