How do you know when your files corrupt without having ECC RAM checking data in RAM and ZFS checking data on disk for corruption? You won't unless you get lucky and open a file by accident and see that it won't work anymore. Then you try to restore that file from your backups, but it might have been corrupted 2 years ago without you noticing it, so all your backups only contain that damaged file as you probably will overwrite your old backups every few months.
In short: Backups are great in case your disks fail or are hit by ransomware. Those won't protect you from data corruption unless you get proper RAM and storage or you never delete any backups.
So it really depends on how much you care about your data. Go without ECC and ZFS and it will be as safe as a bare metal consumer Windows PC. But a consumer Windows installation isn't as safe as you think...you first need to lose some hundred GBs of files and decades of home photo to understand that ECC RAM, filesystems with integrity checks, raid with redundancy and following the 3-2-1 backup rule is worth every cent...
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