Thoughts/ideas on backing up my system

Hi,

As I have installed software on my laptop over the years and customised my OS the idea of a hardware or firmware failure leading me to have to setup and reinstall everything from scratch is making me increasingly anxious.

I have a NAS with two drives in a RAID configuration so my data is not the main conce.

I see two solutions to this:

1. Clone the OS. My conce with this approach is a) it strikes me are quite a tricky procedure which I would have to do regularly b) I will eventually have to replace my laptop with a newer model, I suspect it will not be possible/advisable to load a ISO of an operation system configured for certain hardware to a different machine, but then I may be wrong.

2. Build a desktop machine for use as server and remote into this from my laptop like a client. Of course the server could fail but I suspect it will be easier to repair or replace/upgrade components without having to replace the entire machine. Downside to this of course is the cost of hardware and energy cost of ruing the server constantly, and perhaps some decreased performance and the inconvenience of working via remote desktop.

Anybody have any thoughts on the above? Anybody have any better solutions?

Thanks