[thaumaturgy]

A slightly nicer solution that still has the same spirit as your approach is to use BackupPC: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/info.html

I've used it for many, many years. Setup is a bit of a pain, especially if it's your first time, but it's a totally reliable backup system and gives you something much better than just a pile of zip archives.

All of our servers get BackupPC'd (rsync-over-ssh, pulled) twice a day to an in-house server that's totally unreachable from the internet. I get emails from BackupPC when something goes wrong, which is pretty much never. Backups aren't a thing I have to worry about much anymore.