Before considering what backup software to use you need to define your storage strategy. One of the greatest mistakes any computer user makes is to maintain just a single hard drive containing everything - op sys, apps, downloads, user data . . . etc. This bad practice has been encourage by Windows having user folders embedded into the system drive with names like My Documents, My Downloads, My Videos. The end product is a great monstrosity called drive C which just keeps on growing until one day the system is found to be unbootable, the op sys is reinstalled and user data is lost, all applications gone all downloads and updates need to be repeated . . . Drive C should be limited to storing just the operating system, along with all installed applications programs. All user data files, downloads etc should be stored on a separate drive or partition. This way the system drive is unlikely ever get bigger than say 40GB unless you have masses of extremely large installed apps.
We all have our favourite backup software and mine is Acronis True Image (you can get a free trial download). True Image runs under Windows, creates a full image of the drive (compressed down to about 50% of the size). This image can be used to fully recover your system including all configuration settings, installed update and applications programs in about ten minutes as opposed to all the time and effort in having to reinstall the op sys and recover all your apps. The image should be stored on the data drive and I save the three most recent images. The images can also me mounted as a virtual drive to recover individual files or folders as well as recovering the entire drive. It can be used to recover from anything such as bad installs, malware, file corruption etc.
If you only have one physical hard drive as I have in my laptop then the system and data drives will just be logical partitions of the same physical drive. If (when) the physical drive totals you lose the lot at ne stroke so the data drive should be copied in its entirety to an external medium (I maintain two external usb hard drives for this). This may sound a bit of overkill bit it depends on how important your data is - you only have to read thru forums like this to discover how many people have lost years of records, photographs etc thru not securing their systems.