Think of the desired recovery sequence from the anticipated level of failure, then work backward from there to build and maintain the resources & readiness.

To prepare for a complete recovery starting from a blank laptop drive, I like a minimum of 2 small USB 3 pendrives (8 GB) for alternative booting & OS (re)installation, plus a much larger USB 3 pendrive or preferably HDD for archiving. You prepare one pendrive so it's bootable Windows install media, and the other pendrive so it's a bootable Linux live/install-media (like Linux Mint) of your choice.

Either one of these pendrives need to be able to boot your computer whether or not it has a (working) internal laptop drive or not.

Ideally you will habitually always keep all your valuable data, self-created and downloads, on some other drive(s) rather than C:, well organized using your own folder scheme where you can easily confirm the existence and readiness of these non-system backups manually. As long as your laptop is working properly you can copy and paste these folders to as many external or cloud drives as you find suitable.

This leaves only the Windows operating system and installed programs plus all of their various settings alone being the actual residents of your working C: drive at all times. Even though all your programs are always installed on C: you never let your apps default to saving (your) data to C: or the Users folder, always make sure your data goes where you specifically select on a drive different than C:. This has always been a very low-risk approach to Windows disaster preparedness.

So you've got all your valuable storage, creations & downloads on some other volume than C: at all times plus manually copied or synced with other drives like the external HDD or cloud.

Or maybe not, either way what you really need is a good quick backup of your current Windows (and everything else that might be there) on C:, especially if the next day the internal laptop drive hardware has complete failure and needs replacement.

Backup your C: volume as a Windows image (WIM) file;

With the laptop working properly and in readiness for the full C: to be archived, shut down completely then boot to the pendrive having the appropriate Windows setup media. Do not select Install, instead "Repair" and proceed to the command prompt.

Plug in your USB archive storage drive, then using DISM /capture-image create a comprehensive WIM file of your C: volume, placing the WIM file onto the external storage for safekeeping. This file should be named as a snapshot of your C: at that particular time. This file will be capable of being restored to any properly formatted partition, either GPT or MBR.

To recover to a new/blank laptop drive;

Boot the Windows Install pendrive to the command prompt, use DISKPART to partition the laptop drive then format a new empty C: volume. Exit from DISKPART.

Use DISM /apply-image to restore your WIM file from external USB storage over to the laptop's empty C: volume.

Create new boot folder(s) using BCDBOOT (on MBR systems you will need to direct the boot files to a primary partition marked "active").

On MBR systems you will also need to BOOTSECT a partition with /MBR for blank drives which do not yet have anything but a partition table in sector 0.

Some systems will not then boot by themselves so need an additional boot to the Windows setup pendrive for the Startup Repair.

Full volume recovery from WIM files is also useful for migration between different partitions or hardware sizes, and the freshly recovered folders start out in defragmented condition.

The remaining bootable Linux pendrive is in case you need to boot your laptop and get online, with or without any internal drive you could still download the latest Windows install media for instance and save your downloads to the external drive. You could also use it to install Linux instead of or in addition to Windows.