GUEST,Malcolm Storey wrote: ... the revelation that SSD drives are prone to fail without warning and be extremely difficult if not impossible to recover data from.

This is broadly true.

Received wisdom is that the reliability of an SSD is mainly dependent on the number of writes to it. Bit this recent article makes a different claim - that age, not usage, affects reliability. If like me you keep machines for years (I still use a laptop made in 2006) that's not good news.

I put an SSD in my wife's 8 year-old Lenovo Thinkpad (was once XP, then 7, then free-upgraded to 10, now clean-installed 10) It had slowed down to the extent that the alternative was a replacement, and a similar machine was ~£1000. It's now as fast as when new, and quicker to start.

SSDs will become more reliable over time (so don't buy a cheaper older model).

And yes - backup to at least two places. USB 'Passport' drives are easy - but don't leave them plugged in.

(I generally use control-S for save.)