Backing up laptop with btrfs, what is OK and are there any simple steps?

These are read-only tests. Typically users want to write to the file system. They want to check the atomic behaviour of their drives.

https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Hardware.html

A full balance without filtering reallocates all chunks and is indeed a great sanity check: Infamous Host erlangen - #4 by karlmistelberger