I recently corrupted some of my files on my hard drive so I have been thinking about ways to secure my files a little better so I thought about backing up my files, what would be the best way to do that?

Is it somehow possible to backup the whole hard drive and then let's say all the files get corrupted, I could just get rid of the corrupted files and use the backup, is that possible? If so, would the backup also contain the operating system it self, literally everything?

I have never backed up anything in my life, though I have lost all of my files two times at least.

there are lots of ways to back stuff up really, you can copy specific files and directories to another location, or you could actually take a bit for bit image of a certain partition using a tool like "dd". this contains some useful linkage to get you going...

http://www.linux-backup.net/App/