Stupid hard drives

This is the 5th hard drive that breaks down these past two years... Western Digital, Maxtor, SATA, IDE, it doesn't matter what it is, they just break down either home or at the office. What doo I have to do to protect my data? At the office we got a 300GB external MAxtor one, so what I do is that I downloaded this nice software Vice Versa Pro, which I assigned to backup my research folder at the external drive every night at 3am. So, my data are always backed up every day. Maybe I'll get another one for home it seems, where it is more annoying. This time my main SATA hard drive that the OS was installed crashed and started making noises. grrr....