Welcome to the community, dear @eosfan.
Updates that are sent to your device OTA and you are going to be notified about are safe to perform by yourself as the instructions guide you. No data shall be lost.
Major updates between Android # (10 → 11, P → Q) are safer with partition formatting. You can find the device specific instruction/manual following Smartphone Selector Doing so, taking backup is strongly recommended. Upgrades require some advanced user skills, but read through the manual and judge yourself.
There is a TWRP recovery commands to backup and restore the content of the whole device (except media and download, see further). It may be possible to backup and restore selectively only user data (photos, documents, downloads, etc.), but I do not recommend to do it between major updates. Plus, we know nothing about your Recovery partition. E.g., e-recovery has no such options.
I would separate the ‘everything’ into user data, applications’ and OS settings. User data you can backup via USB connection by connecting your device to a computer. These you can safely copy back after the upgrade.
OS settings is not transferable, to my knowledge.
Apps may have their own import and export options, but not all. If they do not have one, transferring settings is not trivial and I consider it not possible.
I recommend to try backing up and saving as much relevant data as you would wish to restore later – just as a practice. Write a list about it. Extend the list over the next week, when using the device. I personally forgot quite some data at the first major restore 