is it ssd or hdd? have you tested it before storing?

This is a way to cheat the system, fun to do with spotify or anything not critical, but it's not a game I want to play with my backups.

What if they don't give such discounts next year? Or the discounts will be for new users only, so you have to use a different email, maybe a different credit card, each year. You will end up paying more or left without backups.

This length of time can be anywhere from a few nanoseconds to years or much longer.

It's hard to derive exact conclusions from this theory.

for testing, you can create two VHD virtual disks on the drive and mount them as RAID0. This way you can try out if the method have any benefits or not.

however I doubt about the method, because your partitions, or VHDs are linear. One is at the beginning of the disk and fast, other is the second half on the disk which has slower access speeds and also the throughput is slower.

just don't fall into the typical trap:

1. I am brave, backup is for losers
2. I lost everything, I must do the perfect backup setup in the world
3. I still on a way to design my ultimate backup solution
4. I lost everything again because my amazing multilevel backup setup missed one link and it did nothing for months without realizing that

Just get a simple external drive and use one software that you know well. It means that you previously tested, and you are familiar with its working and recovery methods. Add some monitoring, best if the backup software can send emails.

When you have this base layer, then you can think about extending it to cloud, multiple locations, etc. First just do an easy simple stable reliable solution.

Multiple levels of encryption is useless, it just makes the system more complicated and error-prone. Either trust in the encryption built-in to the backup software, or do not use any application level encryption and use disk-level method.

I already have veeam community on win server and it is great, but... great in every sense. It needs a lot of background processes, a full-blown MSSQL server, memory, etc.

However now I think about adding agents to the windows machines and do the backup remotely. I didn't want to do it before, because I liked the simplicity of local backup to a simple external drive.

I use endless incremental method with 60 days history. So I always have 60 days to go back with having only one full backup that gets the expired incrementals merged automatically. This way the daily backup only takes a few minutes and it doesn't need too much overhead space to store multiple full images as with other methods. It is also encrypted and uses VSS so it can backup everything on a live system. Sends email if there was a problem, supports pre an posts scrips to mount my backup drive, etc.

I also do independent full backups occasionally of course, but the previous one is the main reason for Macrium. Sometimes I just use it to dump other disks or old SDcards to a compressed image file that I can mount and use easily if needed.

I have daily image backups of the OS drives with a history of 60-90 days.

my Windows is also stable, except when the SSD kills itself upon a sudden power loss...

we don't backup. when our HDD goes wrong, we just post on r/DataHoarder

.rar with 10% recovery record

use USB 3 dock. USB 2 is slow.

please ask this every day