Updating Arch the right way - Please critique my practices

Hello. Please critique how I'm updating / maintaining my new Arch installation so I can fix anything I'm doing wrong. This is mostly what I could gather from the Arch wiki tailored to my system. I think I know what I'm doing - but as I've often learned, it's easy to misunderstand or overlook some things.

Step 1: perform an incremental full system backup so I have something to restore if the update borks anything. I've chosen to use the rsync command as laid out on the wiki:

sudo rsync -aAXHv --delete --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} / /media/linuxhdd/archrsyncbackup

I have a large hdd mounted as a secondary drive under /media/linuxhdd. It is configured to automatically mount from fstab using uuid. Both my root drive and that hdd are formatted ext4. I'm not using the -S option because I don't think I'll be using virtual machines (I have other hard drives I can make bootable). --delete is used so I maintain one current set of files for restore purposes. This keeps the copying and transfer time to a minimum. (I maintain disk images offline with a different tool - this is simply one local copy for easy restoration purposes)

Step 2: Check the Arch wiki - follow instructions for any manual steps

Step 3: once every 1-2 months, update the mirror list using reflector

sudo reflector --protocol https --verbose --latest 25 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

This should sort the fastest 25 mirrors into mirrorlist. Remember to use the -Syyu option in step 6 if this step was done

Step 4: Clean the journal

sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=4weeks

This should keep 4 weeks of files.

Step 5: Clean the cache

sudo paccache -r

This should keep no more than 3 versions laying around. Once and a while, I can clean out all uninstalled packages with -ruk0 options instead.

Step 6: Upgrade Arch packages with pacman

sudo pacman -Syu

I need to watch for pacnew and pacsave files and deal with them (although I haven't seen any yet)

Step 7: Review the pacman log

nano /var/log/pacman.log

This should tell me about any warnings, errors, instructions, or other things I need to deal with.

Step 8: Remove Orphans

pacman -Qtdq | sudo pacman -Rns -

This could be recursive and needs to be run more than once. Instead, I'll just run it once every time I update. This should keep things cleaned out.

Step 9: Update AUR packages

Check the build scripts to make sure the package hasn't been taken over and that it won't run anything funny.

yay -Sua

This should update just the AUR packages

Step 10: Remove AUR orphans

yay -Yc

The wiki says this "removes unnecessary dependencies" which I believe means AUR-only orphan packages.

Step 11: Reboot

reboot

Step 12: Update flatpaks from the GUI (Gnome-->Software-->Updates)

Any mistakes? Suggestions?

Thanks!