Really bummed.....lesson learned, I hope!?!

Our external hard drive and wireless router crashed last week. We had a few power surges go through our house (not sure why, probably power related, as it was cloudy and rainy) and that is the only thing we can figure caused both items to fail. I just want to cry. I did take the hard drive to our computer repair shop and they got about 1/2 of it copied before it totally died on them. I should be grateful they were able to recover that much, because it was the really important stuff. But they were not able to recover our pictures (and yes, they are very important, just not as much so as my budget). We had gotten really complacent the last few years, and just a few months ago we talked to a friend about what is the best way to back up our stuff so this sort of thing didn't happen. He said to get another hard drive and just copy everything once a week. He actually has 3 hard drives and alternates saving to 2 of them. We thought that was a great idea, and had an extra hard drive sitting around, so we started backing up our "main" hard drive, but somehow we got lax, and didn't get much backed up. SO STUPID OF US:(