I don’t know. I set up a friend of mine who was a complete computer novice with Linux Mint on his laptop well over a year ago and he has not called me for support a single time, where he was regularly calling for help with Windows. People who are afraid of technology usually don’t go randomly clicking on stuff to see what happens. I’m pretty sure that grandma is safe. Plus, if you’re spending HOURS configuring a computer for an elderly person who likely won’t use it very often…you’re doing it wrong.

What I also do is create a complete backup of all of my computers to an external SSD with Rescuezilla on a semi regular basis, so I always have something to fall back to should the entire system or storage device goes belly up. 

I personally don’t store ANY data on any of my laptops. I use Nextcloud and sync the files I want access to on the go. The rest stays on my Nextcloud server at home.

If you are looking for a (mostly) fool-proof backup system that can restore changed settings and files even from a few minutes ago, you want macOS and Apple’s Time Machine. Pull out your wallet and hand it to Tim Apple.

Backups are your friend. As others have said, just automate backing up to an external device.

I’ve been doing PC hardware for over 25 years. This is likely related to your laptop display - either the cable connecting the panel to the motherboard, the panel itself, or some motherboard component connected to the display output that has failed.

Try pivoting the display back and forth and see if the glitches change in response. If they do, it’s the cable.

Beyond that, you’d need to do some testing to find the hardware component that has gone bad.

About a year ago, I trialed both Proton Mail and Tuta mail. Proton mail worked out better for my needs, but YMMV. 

One nice thing about switching providers is that it gives you the opportunity to rid yourself of years of built-up cruft and spam.

Icarus (Die Another Day) is real?

I use Ventoy to boot everything but macOS. Those installers need their own partitions on the SSD.

Do yourself a favor and skip the USB drive - they are ridiculously slow compared to a compact external SSD. I found a cheap m.2 enclosure on Amazon and put an old SSD in it and the speed difference is breathtaking.

My SSD has a bunch of Linux distros grouped into folders along with Windows 10 & 11, every macOS from 10.13 to present, along with Rescuezilla, Hiren’s and a few others I can’t remember at the moment.

Rescuezilla was my #1 go-to during my days of distro hopping. Makes it super easy to try out a distro on bare metal instead of a VM.

Why would you continuously record? Just record motion events and you won’t need a card that large at all, plus it will last a lot longer.

I feel like this is a product looking for a market. Why would anyone ever trust that much data to something so fragile and easy to lose?

And after you spend 14 hours filling it with data, it falls out of your shirt pocket when you lean over to tie your shoe, gets caught by a gust of wind, and is gone forever.