comments:
Is the $250 for the laptop only, or including the 2x 1TB SSD's? Because that's not going to happen if it's for both. You can find renewed Lenovo Thinkpad Laptops for about $250 on Amazon or ebay that come with 256GB SSD and 16GB RAM and Windows. Perfect general purpose laptop. I picked up a Lenovo x13 gen 1 AMD for $270 with 32GB RAM and 256GB SSD and it works great (I swapped the 256GB with a spare 1TB I had - RAM is not upgradeable on the one bought). Here is one example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYNRKKGX The simplest way would be to use a cloud service like OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc so your photos are automatically synced from your phone to the cloud. And then install the client on the laptop and set it to download everything. But you will need a drive big enough to store it. Then periodically sync it to an external drive. So if you have the budget for two 1TB SSD's, put one in the laptop, one in an external enclosure, and then you have the one in the cloud. Or if you want to avoid the cloud altogether, use something like PhotoSync or FolderSync since they are cross platfrom Android/iPhone/Windows/Mac and can sync from your phone to your laptop over the local network. For backing up to the external drive, there are lots of sync programs between drives. In Windows, Robocopy is a powerful built in option that will only update your backup if it's new or changed. Or use something like FreeFileSync.