The Recovery partition and disks have nothing to do with
your data. It is a way to "recover" the PC to the way it was when you removed it from the box.
You should and need to take responsibility for having (at least) a second copy somewhere other than the hard drive of any data that is important to you. One way is to take a full disk image periodically as suggested by others above. That has advantages and I will do that some day but haven't yet. What I do is make a copy of my data once or twice a month. I save the copy on CD and/or USB flash drive.
Vista makes a "shadow" copy of your changed files/folders at least once a day. These are good backups because you can even retrieve various versions of a document that you maybe change every day or two. But don't rely only on these shadow copies because they will be difficult to recover if (when) someday you cannot boot Windows. Usually impossible to recover if you suffer a failure of the hard drive.
You can get an overview of recovery and shadow copy, etc., in the Help and Support Center.
In the Business, Enterprise and Ultimate editions Vista also supplies the ability to retrieve shadow copies. For other versions there is at least one 3rd party utility ShadowExplorer:
www.shadowexplorer.com
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Windows Vista 
Solved: HP Recovery 
and says it's a total of 11.9GB and 1.46GB is left. What exactly is this doing on my computer? If it is saving things for me what kind of things is it saving and can I look at what it has saved so I can delete some of it? Also can I delete the HP recovery if I don't want it or is that not a good idea?
