I wouldn't say it's overy complex...but it _can_ be costly, in certain cases.
This appears to be a fairly decent primer...
It appears that you're simply tired of making backups, and want to be able to recover from a disk failure, without too much effort.
To really give good advice, we'll need to know how much data you have, and how much storage space you plan to require in the next few years. Also, what are your performance requirements, and most importantly: your budget.
If you want to maximize capacity while keeping decent performance, I would recommend a RAID5 array, but it requires a minimum of three disks. In the IDE world, the controllers tend to be overly expensive. For SCSI, the controllers are cheaper, but disks are more spendy.
I am a fan of RAID1, because it doubles the effective reliability of a standalone disk, requires a minimum of only two disks, and boosts read performance.