The second half is about backing up all your files.
My recommendation here is to have two similar sized hard drives in your machine. Then every now and again you run a little script which will copy everything in the drive to the other one by comparing all the files and updating anything that has changed. You can do that in one line which I will show in a mo. With the script that I run, if you have new files then it will copy them over. If you have an existing file which has changed then it will copy over the old one with the new one. If you have old files which have not changes then it will skip them.
Now obviously if you have an existing file and modify it so that it then becomes incorrect then when you back up it will overwrite the old correct one with the new incorrect one. That is a risk but if you modify your work and save out the new file with the increasing file post fix number then that is not an issue any more.
So this strategy will prevent you losing data from a hard drive failure. If your backup hard drive fails then you need to buy a new one and run the back up as soon as possible and get a new copy set. If your main working drive fails then you need to buy another, you lose files from the period between the last backup. Hence backup often and whenever you feel like you wouldn't want to redo whatever your doing.
The other downside to this is that the backup drive also has copies of old files which you might have deleted or moved in directory around. You can manually go in and delete stuff later on the backup drive which you don't want to keep any more. My experience tho is that this hardly ever happens and I am happy to accumulate the extra cruft and not worry about it being there.
If your PC does blow up spectacularly like mine did then it can take out both hard drives at the same time. So I think its a good idea to have an external USB hard drive. You can plug this in now and again and then run a similar one line script to copy the working hard drive to this one. With USB2 or USB3 now the data rate to the hard drive is faster that the write speeds of almost every drive so its not an issue. It used to be with USB1 or tape drives tho in days gone by. If you have a NAS then this is a similar option and your sorted but this tutorial is for those without special backup systems in place.
Now, if your PC blows up your drive is on a shelf and that's your monthly back up. I also have a couple of drives which I fill once in a while and take out of the building which are my last resorts. If a meteor hits the place then I lose a lot but not my life's work. Instead of using a dedicated USB drive, I have a USB drive caddy and I plug in raw drives into that and use them like USB drives - its the same thing but the caddy is shared across all the the raw drives so is cheaper. I know you can do cloud storage but I don't trust anything I don't own.
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