Ask HN: What is your backup plan for laptop if you have windows 10 laptop?

I have a windows 10 laptop and am pretty concerned the unstable updates will one day break my laptop

I want to have some backup plan

Like Alternate OS Any CD or Pendrive which can just boot into a OS when windows breaks?

But i don't see a clear plan available for this. Because when i had a alternate OS installed my previous windows update ruined it and made it inaccessible.

Given its a 1000$ device i really want to keep my laptop functional with or without windows. What do you guys do to prevent your laptop from going waste.

For Windows and Macs I've found Backblaze to be the best there is.

Their $5 a month plan for unlimited storage makes sense if you have more than 1TB of data to store and is a set and forget tool.

If your backups will be smaller than 1TB it's much cheaper to use Backblaze B2 or Amazon S3 for storage.

You can set up an automated full system backup using scheduled jobs via either duplicity, borg, duplicati or duplicacy. All of them are great tools. I've yet to try out restic.

I also like to follow #3 for a full system backup. Additionally, I take this onto a drive that I can just drop into the laptop and be running again instantly. Some pros and cons of the approach:

Pros:

A. I do not have to trust the restore process. That is an issue specially with #1, where testing whether a restore will actually work is hard [1]. I have had cases when I had successful backups but when needed, the restore gave an instant non-helpful error message and the support staff was equally non-helpful. They already have the EULA set to save themselves under such scenarios.

B. I use two hard disks ideally bought at two years offset wrt each other. Hard disks have a life of typically four years. When the laptop drive fails, I swap it with the backup drive and go buy a new drive to use as backup from that point on.

Cons:

A. Process is time-consuming. It is also error-prone, so presents a large cognitive load. As a result, I always use #1 as the regular backup method, on local drives or cloud.

B. The system would sometimes fail to "boot" from the backup, but this has always been just a matter of fixing the master boot record using Windows disks, stressful and time-consuming nevertheless. Theoretically, Windows piracy prrotection can also trigger from the hardware change, but it never has since there is some allowance for exactly these type of fair situations.

[1] Even with #1, the local backup method I use is uncompressed copies of the files, so that the restore process is plain file copying also. There are many free tools to manage this incrementally like FreeFileSync, Syncback Freeware, etc.

I've not kept it up lately, but I used to make an "image" of my boot drive Windows installation (I keep data on a second SSD) using Ghost32.exe (from Ghost Solution Suite tools) ran from something like Win8PE_SE.

My data is backed up automatically using FileBackupEX to a local NAS on my network. Then the NAS backs itself up to another NAS offsite.

I have a ThinkPad with an ExpressCard slot. I have a small stack of 64gb "Wintec Filemate" ExpressCard SSDs, each with a different operating system installed. To boot my laptop I simply select one of these, insert it into my laptop and turn it on. All my personal files are stored on two partitions on the internal laptop drive.

Of course you don't need any special slots to use multiple operating systems. As another commenter mentioned, you can install different operating systems to separate partitions. I've noticed that Windows is much less picky about sharing a hard drive than it used to be, but if you are concerned you could get, for instance, a caddy to put a second hard drive in your CD tray, or use USB disks.