Possibly a bit off-topic, but as we talk about backup / restore .. a few thoughts.

If you postpone updates too much, then you miss possibly important security updates.

Most important here is to implement a good working and tested backup/recovery !!

Then you can live well with postponing only up to 30 days, where you had some issues with.
In the rare case that there is still a bad patch/update, well then recover to the day before.

This can/should be supported by choosing a good disk layout.
Best is to keep user data separate and to store them ideally on a different drive.
This makes it possible to restore the OS without loosing the last changes in your projects / user data.

It is recommended to also move the from Microsoft prepared folders to the separate disk, e.g.
c:\users\<loginname>\(Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, etc) to u:\users\<loginname>.
You can easily do it by opening the properties of the prepared folders, to select move and provide as destination folder
u:\users\<loginname>.

By this the new files there will be moved to that location, but not overwriting what is already there.
Additional advantage is that the registry will be updated automatically, so that you can continue to use Microsoft prepared folder names like "My Documents" in the file explorer or elsewhere.

Sadly you can't move all files from your userprofile to that other disk, also not the location, where the application settings reside (c:\users\<loginname>\appdata\{Local, LocalLow, Roaming]. But this is not too bad, as the configuration of applications does not change that often.

The only thing which I have to backup separately are my Firefox bookmarks !!
I export them to a folder on the separate drive and restore them after restoring the disk image as a 2nd step
     u:\users\<loginname>\Documents\0-Firefox-Bookmarks

But the goal is reached. This way, with a good disk image based backup program, you can restore at any time, if something becomes messed up. Also the TotalMix FX Last Settings File and other related setup files are restored automatically by this.

Which backup software for what purpose?

I am using a combination of reliable disk image program (Macrium Reflect Home) for the Windows installation alone
and FreeFileSync to mirror my user data in "native format".
The latter has the advantage that I do not depend on a backup software, which might have bug.
It is important for me to have granted access to my user data, with an archive format you depend on a working application.
For the OS it doesn't matter much, as you might have backups of the disk image and in the worst case you can install new but still have your user data in safe harbour.

Macrium Reflect Home

The strength of Macrium Reflect Home disk imaging software is reliability, speed and cool features.
They have a nice mechanism to change only those blocks on disk / ssh that needs change.
They call it "rapid delta restore". By this a restore is much much faster and reduces the "wear" on SSDs.

I can make a restore of my 850GB on Boot SSD in less than 15 minutes, including boot times, until I can work again.
My server mainboard has a long BIOS post phase. Normal consumer boards with faster boot times would be even faster.

That is simply awesome! You have a problem ? Something went wrong due to bad patch or whatever ?
10-15 min for a restore and everything is fine again!!!

Another advantage of splitting OS/applications and user data is, that the disk images are not so large, because I have a lot of data. Backup / restore is simply faster.

The latest version fo Macrium Reflect Home (called "X") went to a subscription model, which I personally do not like.
So, if you are interested then best get a v8.1 license, if you find somebody who would sell it to you.
Otherwise, fast and reliable backup / recovery is important, better a subscription of a trustworthy program, than having issues with backup / restore.

Also remarkable, the recovery program can be stored on boot disk into the boot menu, on USB sticks or CD-Rom.
Additionally needed drivers (e.g. for network or USB3 cards) are automatically added to the recovery image.
So it is guaranteed, that you can perform a recovery from a network drive, in case you have a NAS storage.

Also good, the proposed backup schemas. I like "Granfather, Father, Sun" much. It is a combination of full, differential and incremental backups which also speed up the restore process.
Restore from one full, one differential and maybe one or more incremental backups is much faster than backup from one full and a LOT of incremental backups as every incremental backup file has to be analysed if there is interesting data for restore.

FreeFileSync

FreeFileSync is a proven solution for mirroring files at top speed. It is the best that you can get since over a decade.
Open Source, nice gui, possibility to export batch files which you can automate in Windows as backup job.

I am giving the author a donation quite often for this very good program.

A cool feature is, that you can configure backup files with a timestamp to keep a history of modified files.
And this is not all, you can configure, that those backup files have to reside in a parallel path.
This has two advantages:
- if you restore one or multiple folder, then you do not copy the backup files with a timestamp, they are not needed
- if you are missing space on your backup disk, you can recursively delete this folder to re-gain space by
removeing the backup files with timestamp.
I configured up to 20 backups of a file. But if you are low on disk space maybe 3 backups with timestamp could be sufficient.

My daily automatic backup jobs

So I have here every day at 6am (or later, when the computer starts) two backup jobs running
a) Macrium Reflect to perform a disk image of the complete Windows driver (RAID-0, 20 TB)
b) FreeFileSync mirror job to internal RAID and two external USB3 drives (2x 20 TB)

Just to give you some ideas, how you can organize things in a good way to have reliably options for fast and reliable recovery.