Painfully Slow!

painfully slow computers sometimes are so slow because their Hard drive is dying. If you do not have a Trusted backup, that should be your top priority, or soon you may have no pictures at all.

Once you have done that, this little non-invasive Utility provides a good view of what is going on inside your mac without revealing any personally-identifiable information:

using etrecheck

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Time Machine is built into MacOS. If you are using another backup method that you prefer, that is great. If not, you need to take steps to acquire an external drive as soon as possible. If you buy one, a drive 2 to 3 times or larger that your boot drive is preferable for long term trouble-free operation. Do not pay extra for a drive that is fast. (You can get by for a while with a "found" smaller drive if necessary, but it will eventually become annoying).

Attach your external drive and use

System preferences > Time Machine ...

... to turn on Time Machine. It may ask to initialize the new drive, and that is as expected.

Time Machine will then spend all afternoon making your first full backup. You can continue to do your regular work while it does this. The first Full Backup is by far the biggest backup. After that, it will work quietly and automatically in the background, without interrupting your regular work, and only save the incremental changes.

Time machine's "claim to fame" is that it is the backup that gets done, because it does not ruin performance of the rest of the computer while doing its backup operations. When you need it, it is much more likely to be there.