Backup Solutions?

[Siosilvar]

So about three weeks ago now, Windows decided that it didn't like my hard drive and rendered it near-useless - two of the three partitions are inaccessible and nothing will boot with it attached. Today, I realized that my backups were also inaccessible, though thankfully not due to failure as far as I can tell - I'm going to find my Ubuntu boot disk and take a look around tomorrow.

Does anybody have any recommendations for backup solutions to take better care my stuff sticks around? I already have an old desktop box that I picked up for cheap (a stock Optiplex 360, as far as I can tell) with a brand-new disk in it, what should I look into software wise for backups and/or light duty network storage?

Also, I did some poking around for recovery software and found TestDisk. Seeing as I don't have anything worth paying professionals to recover, and the drive still physically works, can anybody vouch for the program?

[Gnomvid]

TestDisk has saved me a few times and will be perfect as long as there's no physical fault with the disk (not spinning up, faulty read/write heads) Easus has also been good to me recovering lost partitions and data.
I personally do my backup to a Drobo (external disk enclosure with built in RAID) as I used to have a system board with built in raid support but if there's a problem with the board you still have a problem so I decided on an external solution for safety.

[factotum]

I just backup everything important to an external drive using SyncToy (freebie available from Microsoft)--it just takes a straight copy of one folder into another one, but only copies the stuff that's changed. I have that run five minutes after I log in to my machine, and by the time I've finished browsing the web the backup is finished.