Looking for drive backup/image program recommendations

Since CrashPlan discontinued its consumer product, I don't have a personally tested free product recommendation for Windows. I've used Macrium's commercial product, Reflect, and they offer a free version for desktops. [Note that Reflect Free only creates full disk or partition image backups, not file backups.]

I'd be cautious about local-only backups in Windows, though - typical ransomware will attempt to encrypt anything on a mounted or mapped drive, including proprietary backup file formats. Ideally, you shouldn't keep critical backups on any persistently connected local medium.

If you have a clear and discrete set of files you know you want to preserve, and you have access to a capacious Microsoft OneDrive through a university account, you may be able to use OneDrive Sync. Depending on policy settings, you should be able to keep months' worth of versions of your synchronized files (effectively, backups), up to the full capacity of your cloud storage.

Likewise, if you have a Google account, there's Google Backup and Sync.

Privacy in either cloud product is somewhat questionable, especially for education accounts.

I was also a former Crashplan customer and once that went away, I began using Duplicati as a free software alternative and backup to my local NAS. You can encrypt your files on a remote drive. This software also supports numerous other remote targets for your backups.

Depending on your setup you might be able to just configure raid1 on your system. If you have an Intel board and raid is enabled there's an tool to set it up. There are a bunch of caveats so read the help article.

This would help in case one of the drives fails, but wouldn't help you save the data from catastrofic failures (eg your house burns down). For that you need an off site backup solution.