And it was a real pain if you had to reinstall it, with all the excruciatingly slow windows 7 updates, security tweaks that we were forced to do, customizations to get it how we liked it etc. It always took me days to a week of fiddling with the os to get it secure and how I liked it (I’d only work an hour or 2 a day on it usually)
It was a real pain in the butt to keep it secured (mostly secured at least) and there was a spell on the net where we were getting viruses left and right from being redirected from sites that got hacked- thankfully I used a program called RollBack RX and could rall back to a safe time before the virus hit. Then things calmed down mostly on the net- and only occasionally would hit a site that would redirect.
Linux on the other hand I can have up, customized and to my liking very quickly- I’ve got all the downloads for programs in one spot, email copied and saved, etc. And have never, as far as I know, had any virus
Bu5 with all its downfalls, windows 7 is still my preferred windows os. I have a hard drive duplicator and a couple of duplications incase one drive fails- no more tedious fresh install for me thanks.
Sounds like you have it under control.
I use Clonezilla to keep my hard drive images on an SSD USB drive.
Timeshift is doing weekly backups to another internal hard drive.