I use the free version of Macrium Reflect on three different Windows machines. All three are set to automatically back up to my NAS at 1, 2 and 3 am respectively. Each machine does one full disk image type back up per week followed by 6 differential backups. Each machine has a different day for the full, just in case it runs over it's allotted 1 hour time block and starts to slow up one of the other differentials, although I've never had that problem. I keep three full weeks for each machine. I'm hoping that's far enough back if I ever get some malware and don't realize it right away. Macrium sorts this out automatically for me, deleting the oldest save sets. I do have to manually log onto the NAS once a month and empty the NAS trash folder, though. If a machine misses a backup because it was off it automatically starts one when you next turn it on. For the one laptop, if it's out of the house it will keep trying automatically, once a day, until you get it back on the LAN. It's pretty much a no-brainer, set it and forget it, kind of thing once it is all configured.
Backups are only part of the issue. The restore part is just as important. You build a Macrium Reflect emergency boot disk for each machine. If, or more likely when, your drive finally dies you put that in (I use a thumb drive, not a CD) and boot off of that. So be sure to have that built, and be sure you know how to, and have practiced, booting into it. And also practice attaching to the NAS with it and locating the save set you want. Finally, practice opening a save set and restoring just a single file. It's a good drill, and also very handy if you ever accidentally delete a file. If you have some extra media, it's a very good idea to validate that the entire image restore process works correctly, too.
So far I've used the entire process no less than six times in anger over the last ten years. Twice when trying to push a Windows feature update failed on my main machine (and it still won't go!) Both times it just totally hosed the OS, I couldn't even roll back. I didn't care, 20 minutes later I was right back where I started thanks to Macrium. The other four times an SSD failed without warning. It's not like the old days when your rotating media would start to get cranky and thereby warning you that it was going to die. SSDs are perfect one minute, dead the next. I now keep a hot spare in the main machine. I don't use it for anything, it's just sitting on the motherboard, ready to go, because I just know it's not "if" but "when" for the current drive. I have a GigE link to the NAS. I can restore 200GB image in about 20 minutes. I've never lost more than an hour of work using this method. Anything critical gets stored on the NAS anyway. It's mostly for getting my OS and software back up and running.
BTW, if anyone can recommend similar software for Linux, I have a Linux laptop that I desperately want to achieve the same level of backup automation. I do not want to be in the position I was before I started using Macrium, which was remembering to do manual images to separate USB media on each machine. That's the sort of thing that makes you want to skip backups!
Buy a NAS, get Macrium, and be done with it. All you need to do is make sure the machine is on once a day, and it will be if you are using it.
73,
Scott