I'd also add - absolutely run RAID 1 or some sort of redundancy.
Consider - the best real world estimates state that a hard drive has a roughly 1/500 chance of failing per day - be it getting corrupted, mechanical failures, or the chipset/circuit board(this is actual repair and RMA rates). This isn't so awful, though, and we live with it. Many people get 2-3x that before a major problem happens.
But the chance of a RAID 1 set going out at once is ~1:250,000. And even then you have two entire copies to recover from as well. Also, the chances of both failing in an identical way at once is nearly 0. The trick as well is to use as small of a drive for the boot volume as well. I use 2 160GB drives and it gives me a ~2 hour rebuild time. This means a quick turnaround time as well as lower cost.(plus data recovery firms charge per MB for the entire drive - ouch)
Since every motherboard now supports it, and drives are dirt cheap, it's a no-brainer.
Now - major file storage is a whole other option. I'm a fan of bluy-ray for physical backups. They appear to be stable up to 10 years in the worst reasonable case and that's long enough as far as I'm concerned.