First up, I agree wholeheartedly with those who beat me to it and pointed out that RAID1 - or any RAID Level - isn't backup. It's protection against hardware failure (disk failure, specifically).
A bonus Admin Point to them, docked from your current total of Admin Points!
Now, about your backups. Without going too paranoid, you may well be able to do simple backups to the local disk, which would fulfill your needs.
Create a backup area, and then script something which simply copies (using rsync -av --delete /data/dir/ /backup/dir/ or something similar) all the files from your web server.
Then dump each database (I don't know how to do that with mySQL, which I assume you're using - but there's bound to be plenty of help elsewhere) and use tar (tar -cvf myfile.tar /backup/dir/) and gzip (gzip myfile.tar)to produce one smaller archive file and save yourself some space.
For bonus Admin Points, then put it in as a cron job which runs every night at a low usage period.
And for bonus bonus Admin Points, if you have storage to do spare, create a second copy of the script which backs up somewhere else. That is the script YOU run before you make changes. That way, you have both an automated one in case of issues, and one from before you made changes just in case.
Which may sound nuts, but it at least allows you to "roll back" to a known safe state if you don't find a problem immediately. It's cheaper (in storage costs) than maintaining daily versioned backups, and probably about as useful in 90% of cases for you.
Finally, if you want the backups stored on another machine, now you have just one smaller file to transfer by FTP/SSH. Bear in mind bandwidth costs, but it's probably a good idea to occasionally grab a snapshot of the overnight backups for peace of mind.
(You could script this, and it gets more Admin Points. But that's yet more work, and you've likely already hit the point where you have what you want anyway.)
I hope that helps, and good luck getting your Admin Points back with this little side project! :-)
First up, I agree wholeheartedly with those who beat me to it and pointed out that RAID1 - or any RAID Level - isn't backup. It's protection against hardware failure (disk failure, specifically).
A bonus Admin Point to them, docked from your current total of Admin Points!
Now, about your backups. Without going too paranoid, you may well be able to do simple backups to the local disk, which would fulfill your needs.
Create a backup area, and then script something which simply copies (using rsync -av --delete /data/dir/ /backup/dir/ or something similar) all the files from your web server.
Then dump each database (I don't know how to do that with mySQL, which I assume you're using - but there's bound to be plenty of help elsewhere) and use tar (tar -cvf myfile.tar /backup/dir/) and gzip (gzip myfile.tar)to produce one smaller archive file and save yourself some space.
For bonus Admin Points, then put it in as a cron job which runs every night at a low usage period.
And for bonus bonus Admin Points, if you have storage to do spare, create a second copy of the script which backs up somewhere else. That is the script YOU run before you make changes. That way, you have both an automated one in case of issues, and one from before you made changes just in case.
Which may sound nuts, but it at least allows you to "roll back" to a known safe state if you don't find a problem immediately. It's cheaper (in storage costs) than maintaining daily versioned backups, and probably about as useful in 90% of cases for you.
Finally, if you want the backups stored on another machine, now you have just one smaller file to transfer by FTP/SSH. Bear in mind bandwidth costs, but it's probably a good idea to occasionally grab a snapshot of the overnight backups for peace of mind.
(You could script this, and it gets more Admin Points. But that's yet more work, and you've likely already hit the point where you have what you want anyway.)
I hope that helps, and good luck getting your Admin Points back with this little side project! :-)