You can extend the life of your hard drive by using spinright.
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
It usually will recover lost data and more importantly does a superior job isolating sectors that are going bad and keeps you from saving data there.
I would back up to a CD and a USB external drive. Although tech, don't back up much as I rarely have had failures. Most data failures are my fault by overwriting a file or forgetting to save at the right time.
Good that you are thinking of this, you put in a lot of work.