Sorry for your lost. and the one think i found strange is that lot of inactive accounts are being drained to sepa. So, if the user is inactive here on Hive, must be a very large scale scam.
This is one of my concerns, because even though I left it on an external hard drive, at some point we will need to connect it to the PC, and if it is compromised... the end
Something I usually do when I update these backups is to disconnect the PC from Wifi, trying to minimize any spying at that moment, but I also don't know if this would be effective depending on the spying tools used.
The safest remains paper.