It sounds like you are Ok with connecting your external hard drive to initiate a backup. When my daughter went to University I bought her an Apple AirPort Extreme and a USB Hard Disk, and set her up with Time Machine, so that her Laptop was backed up every hour when she was in her room and her laptop was connected to Power. Time Machine can be a life saver for students when you accidentally overwrite or delete your essay and you can use time machine to roll back to the last backup version.
Unfortunately Apple have recently discontinued the Airport range. I don't have one, but I gather the Synology, range of NAS drives can be connected to a WiFi router and achieve the same result as an Airport Time Capsule, the model DS115j appears to be designed for home users in mind. However just getting a USB 3 external drive is a much cheaper option, provided you are organised enough to remember to connect it on a regular basis.