What is the status of the hard drive in the laptop?  It's completely dead and won't spin up?  It's an old platter one, right?  Depending on how valuable the data is to you, it is probably recoverable.  There are some tricks you can use to "unstick" a platter drive too.

In the past I lost 10 years of my data.  Now I keep everything in three places at once at all times.  At least one of those places should be online.  People have many choices to choose from too.  You can use Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon, or any number of other services.  They are relatively cheap, and backing up to them is simple to setup.

I'm a private investigator, and most people in my line of work use Dropbox for its encryption.  Also, for $60 a month and a business account, you get unlimited data space.  Unlimited!!!  For a home NAS, I recommend the Synology brand.  It has hardware encryption built into it, and it will automatically sync with Google, Amazon, or Dropbox both or only one way.