What type of backup system should I setup?

I recently had my computer crash with RAID 1 (Mirror) hard drives installed. I couldn't get it to boot and windows was unable to repair the drives. Luckily I was able to boot to the command prompt and copy my important files to an thumb drive before I wiped everything and reinstalled Windows.

Since RAID 1 didn't offer me much protection, I would like to setup an external hard drive and figure out some way to keep my important files backed up.

Is there an external harddrive that connects to the network instead of a computer so that I can simply push a button and it will copy/backup specified folders from my two computers?

What's the easiest solution available?

Thanks for the reply. I am expecting to have quite a few GBs of pictures and stuff to backup. I wouldn't mind also doing one of those full system images in case something really bad goes down. I would think an external HDD would be the best option.

Are their any external HDDs that come with automated backup software? For instance, you can connect to it through a browser like you would your router and configure it. Then tell it what folders to monitor for changes. The device would automatically backup the files daily when it detected changes to folders you specified.

Anything like that exist?

A prebuilt NAS might be easiest for you, they often come with software to easily backup stuff. But what happened with copy&paste? You can do backups yourself ofcourse.