I like Windows Backup & Restore

Barman58 said:

There is also a point to be made in favour of using multiple backup devices. Having two disks and alternating between them for each backup or backup cycle. Does give additional security and safety. Ideally you need at least three disks, one connected, one stored safely in the home, and one stored elsewhere, a bank box or similar. Ok this appears overkill but it does give cover against additional threats, a ransomware attack while the drive is connected for backup, theft whilst drive is connected or fire and total loss at any time.

I would recommend this sort of setup for a small business where these days your company is your data.

I do not do this myself for private data but do have a few older drives and will backup images and other important files randomly when I am not using the system as a backup to my backup.

Overkill, yes, and shows more about my roots in the industry where large tape reels and larger tape Recording equipment used to be my companions on a Saturday, (weekly backup day )

I'm pretty much the same as you Nigel. My "overkill" on backups goes back to a bad experience where although we didn't lose customer data which was properly backed up, the loss of a system disk took 36 hours to recover from with a complete rebuild of the OS.

Funny Story Time,

The tapes were held securely in a locked Rack cabinet in the server room in the manufacturing building, secure copies were also kept in a large freestanding Fireproof safe that dominated the Accounts department in a separate block, the key to this Safe was around six inches long, with a removable shaft so you could carry the front part of the key, the Business end so to speak and leave the rest of the key near to the safe.

Had a call out one weekend, the accounts department had been robbed and the safe broken into - when I arrived the police had been and done what they needed forensically, so I had to check the data tapes, which may have been a target, though this was not the case, it was just money missing, they used to keep a lot of petty cash on premises to pay expenses for staff .

The cunning plan of the burglars to get into the safe, was quite easy to see a Large six inch Safe key with the removable security end piece still in place hanging from a hook next to the safe complete with large tied on label, saying "SAFE KEY"

Accountants

Our offsite backups were held by a company specialising in that. They also supplied our offsite recovery facilities. We had to practice activating those once a year. This involved both IT and users.

pbug56 said:

How do you decide the needed backup capacity (drive size) and what brands and models would any of you chose? I'm looking at WD desktop drives, 3-4TB. The system in question has less than 500GB on the data drive, less than 250GB on the system drive.

pbug56 said:

It's a laptop, both bays used, so this needs to be external. There's a WD external desktop with a 3 year warranty, and WD desktop drives seem to work very well for me (as have WD internals). So I might go for the 4tb because it's not much more expensive than the 3TB.

Covered a lot of this in my previous post.

I like Windows Backup & Restore