I haven't backed-up any data on my desktop or laptop. I am thinking of buying a couple of SSDs
for the job. Would backing up the (windows 10) operating system to the external drives be as easy
as doing it for other files on the machines?
A few months ago we replaced the house desktop, because the old one had become painfully slow & occasionally froze. I told Mrs B that it might be fixable, but she insisted on a new one, so we got something with a shiny new NVMe SSD, & she was happy. Impressively fast starting up, loading software & closing down.
This left us with a spare PC which I thought was probably OK but for the HDD, & might do as a spare & for when we both wanted to use one - & we both prefer a proper keyboard & screen. So I bought a SATA SSD & cloned the HDD to it, after removing extraneous data & software then wiping all the free space.
Pretty easy. Just follow the destructions online. After I swapped over the drives, it started up with impressive speed (not quite as fast as the new one, but slower processor, slower RAM, & SATA vs NVMe . . . . ), & has been running happily ever since.
The old drive's been reformatted & is now in the new PC's spare drive bay, used for backups. Had some bad sectors. Not sure if that was all, but it's working fine at the moment.
The SATA SSD is a Kioxia (formerly Toshiba's memory division, & still 40% owned by Toshiba) from their 'Upgrader' range. Rather cheap. I have an old Toshiba external HDD which has been utterly reliable for several years, which influenced me, & the reviews reckoned it was good value & performance was reasonable - & it was only for the spare. Available in 240, 480 & 960 GB. There seem to be plenty of others out there which would also do the job, though.
Also - Windows lets you do image backups.