Well, here's a beginner's question. I am trying to organize my text documents so that I will be able to find anything quickly. My question is: What is the best (most effective) way to keep backups of my documents? Will to much (entire daily) copying cause to much wear and tear?
Thank you,
Josheir
What do you mean by wear and tear? Do you mean with respect to a mechanical or solid-state hard drive?
I don't have a solid state drive. By wear and tear I mean mechanical, the cd-rom drive spinning, processor usage, etc. Perhaps I need some sort of document manager?
Josheir
I see.
This is just my opinion - others may offer different advice. That said, I don't think you should worry too much about wear. Hardware is intended to be used, and backing up is an intrinsic aspect of development. There's no use avoiding it.
More importantly though, from a backup perspective, it's wise to assume any one of your storage devices or locations could go down irreparably at any moment. In other words, instead of worrying that your hard drive is about to expire, just assume it is 
This will push you towards best practice, which is to back up regularly to multiple locations, including cloud-based/off-site.
Common backup strategies include automated backups (e.g. Time Machine in macOS), cloud-based services such as Dropbox or Google Drive, manual archiving (e.g. by creating zip files) to multiple locations, and version control systems. These are all bread and butter as far as data management goes, and you shouldn't worry about using them.
All computer parts will fail eventually, including storage media. Statistically a home user's regular usage pattern is irrelevant to disk failure rates. They'll fail at about the same rate regardless of how you move your files around because home users don't stress the hardware.
Disk failure rates are well-studied, lots of hardware forums and data warehouse companies publish statistics. There is typically a curve that looks like a large U or a bathtub. A relatively high percent of parts fail immediately within the first few months (about 5%). It quickly drops off to about 1% per year for about three years. Then the failure rate increases rapidly over age, with returning to 5% per year failure after 3-5 years.
Always back up data because your disk drives will fail eventually.
Parallel drives like a RAID are not a data backup, they're a redundancy. If the data is corrupted or deleted it will be deleted on both drives.
The common rule is "3-2-1". At least 3 copies, at least 2 media, at least 1 off site. D2D2T, or Disk to Disk to Tape, is extremely easy and common in the workplace. Important stuff is maintained on the individual machines, and maintained on a backup server (second copy), and regularly copied to long-term storage with a data storage company on the cloud (third copy, second media, off site).
What you do at home with your personal files is up to you. I personally still recommend 3-2-1. Start with either an external disk or a NAS drive (you can get a cheap networked drive for about $100, and replace hard drives over the years). Then regularly copy it up to a cloud storage like Google Drive or Amazon Glacier or whatever you like.
With more and more of the world going digital, disk failures are increasingly painful. People used to have boxes full of photos and negatives that could be recovered even if degraded; today they've got a single hard drive with a decade worth of photos that can be wiped out by a random gamma ray. They had printed out copies of all agreements and contracts that could still be read when damaged by water, or kept in a fire safe where they were protected even if the paper got yellow and crispy; today they can vanish in a heartbeat due to a speck of dust on a disk platter, or a spark across an SSD board. Maintain backups.
