Backing up large projects as you go doesn't have to be difficult or techy. What I would say though is if you're working on a laptop it's a much harder thing to achieve because of the drive partitioning required to get two "drives". In other words, a laptop holds only one single physical disk drive because of lack of space. You can partition it, so you have a "backup" drive, with all your files duplicated, but if your drive fails, it's fails as a whole, not by partition.
Get yourself a desktop though, and suddenly space isn't an issue. My desktop has two separate physical drives (along with enough space for two more). One contains the operating system and all my files, and the other contains a copy of all my files. Apple's time machine/ backup thingy takes care of backing up every day/ week/ whenever you ask it to, and if one of my drives fails, it's no biggy because everything I've done exists on the other drive. If you're super paranoid you could also connect a USB drive every week/ month and backup to that too.
Additionally, for the money desktops tend to be more powerful and have more memory, making them faster at processing the large files associated with music production. They don't even have to be massive - you can buy quite modest units with enough space for two drives these days, and hide them behind your monitor.
