I've seen a lot of people in this thread complaining about ads, needless UI changes/broken UI systems, or requirements keeping them away from Windows 11. The main one which keeps me from switching is the requirement for a Microsoft account to authenticate. I am simply not interested in tying my local machine to Microsoft's cloud. I also dislike the ad and dreadful UI changes (why change 'Cut', 'Copy', 'Paste', etc into icons and why have them move around in the UI for no logical reason?) on the hardware/requirement front it actually has me going the other way.

I planned my last hardware upgrade to bring me to the fastest hardware which will run properly on Windows 10 and I'm starting by install Linux on more of my machines to be prepared for when I finally need to upgrade from my 'Last Windows machine" and need an OS which isn't hateful and supports the latest CPU architecture changes.

Google broke that years ago. You can change the From Address but everyone will see your emails as "From yournewfreeaccount12@gmail.com on behalf of you@yourdomain.tld". The only way to avoid this is to configure Gmail to send all outgoing email using your forwarding provider's SMTP infrastructure.

Sadly backups aren't one-size-fits-all as the right solution for one person may not right for another. But here are some of my experiences which may help in deciding what to do: Backup up to optical media is okay, but after a few years the discs may be very hard to read and some data loss may occur. I don't use optical media for backups anymore. A RAID array will protect you from a single drive (dual if RAID 6) drive failure, but won't protect you from accidents, viruses, fire, theft, or malicious intents of others. A local offline backup will protect you from drive failure, viruses and accidents, but may not protect you from fire, theft, or malicious intents and won't have the absolute latest edition of the data. A remote backup will protect you from accidents, fire, and theft but not necessarily from malicious intents. A remote offline backup will protect you from a lot, but the data may not always be up-to-date. The cloud can be expensive, unreliable, or unsafe. (And for those who quote flat-rate unlimited backup offerings, not everyone can make use of those offerings otherwise the solution wouldn't make fiscal sense. You also don't know how well they will protect your data and Murphy knows that your local copy will die around the same time that your 99.99% reliable cloud provider loses half of your data.) (Note that I consider 'offline' not just to be unmounted, but actually physically disconnected from everything.) Personally, I have a RAID array for local safekeeping against hardware failures and I have and offline storage system at a relative's house which I update a few times a year to protect against environmental, accidental, virus, and other problems. For really important things I get, between when I put on the main array and when I do my offline Sync, I'll typically keep the original media around, just in case. There are some holes in my personal backup system, but it's good enough for my needs and doesn't cost that much.