Computer questions from a dummy, crashed/recovered - now what?

My home PC went wonky the other day and I thought it was hopelessly fried. It took a day of screwing around with the startup and startup repair and then finally was able to do a system recovery from a week ago and everything seems fine. No idea what actually happened, it locked up while closing Chrome and opening Firefox and couldn’t startup after that, Safe Mode didn’t work, had to choose startup repair and leave for work and hope something productive happened by the time I got home. It seemed to work, and was able to do the system restore option once I got home.

3-year old machine, running Win7 with all the updates, wondering if it was an update that screwed it up, but have since run the updates again and everything seems fine.

The questions are:
Now that it seems to be running OK again, what do I need to make sure I have on a thumb drive or DVD in case of a startup issue again? I can’t seem to find a definitive answer, and the computer came with what I guess is a partitioned drive with no disks at all.

The other question is, will Google Drive be my best bet for backing up what I have saved on this computer? I had an external drive for pictures and documents and music, but that went splat some time ago and I haven’t replaced it since, eh, I have a newer computer that won’t go splat so soon, right? I need something free to very inexpensive because I’m selectively poor, and I only have about 30 gigs of stuff to save, even the music isn’t as important - the only stuff on my hard drive is what I have on CD’s so it wouldn’t be lost forever, just a pain to re-rip. My pictures are what I want/need to make sure are safe for sure. Since I use an Android phone, I figure Google Drive will be the most convenient?

Thanks to anyone who wants to answer this, I’m hoping it’s easy answers.

It won’t hurt to have a recovery flash drive. They’re cheap enough, and they make good insurance.

Google Drive will also be fine for a backup.

Could be that the issue was that your Hard Drive itself is failing. Certainly 3 years old is not too new for that to happen, although most drives will last longer than that. Backup everything you don’t want to lose, and check your hard drive with Hard Disk Sentinel (http://www.hdsentinel.com/) - I believe it has a 30 day trial. It could have been windows update as well, but a failing drive is a possibility and is a problem you need to check out.