With prices of HDD's going lower and lower, you could have the cheapest HDD you can find, hook it up to a USB device and back up all your data regularly , even doing complete "ghosts" of all the data you have.

That way you would be able to just unhook the HDD from the USB device, and plug it in th PC, and hey! it is back to normal.

Although you can achieve "total" security wit a mirrored RAID configuration, with 2 HDD's, I think it is a bit of an overkill and also sometimes the Power supply dies and collateral damage includes CPU's, RAM, HDD's so a backup disk will probably be fried along with the primary one. Try to keep the eggs in different baskets.

I hope the curent situation does not have a lasting effect in your work