

This is really helpful thank you! I think it’s samba share? Whatever Unraid has just baked in and calls “shares”.
Googling rsync that looks like it’ll work, and faster is better!
While I do want true backups of a few drives (as in: if a drive fails, restore the backup to a new drive, physically swap it out, and you’re good to go), the majority of the data I’m just looking to have it “backed up” (as in: all of the files are present in more than one location). The majority of the data is ~18TB of media for my plex server. My unraid is: 1x 2TB, 1x 10TB, 1x20TB and 1x20TB(parity). It sounds like Rsync-ing the 20TB drive with my plex media and the 20TB unraid disk would get me what I need?
Thanks for the pointers, getting a few things to google is incredibly helpful.
So I had questions on practicing restore! I wanted to start by just making sure I had something, but how does one validate, short of having a duplicate hardware setup to restore to?
Some of this is a bit extreme but a lot of it is capabilities I’ll be slowly building up. Read only backups is a fantastic point. I am indeed working at offsite backups. I have a separate drive for all the “untimely exit” stuff, and, most importantly, a physical printed folder in a fireproof safe. I have had/have some health issues that make it relevant. I strongly encourage practicality of air-tight security there. A plain text with accounts and passwords is a bad idea, but plain text naming where accounts are is reasonable. Yes, there’s always social engineering, but the people at those firms should be looking for proper legal documentation from the executor of the estate, and 98% of people are more likely to have a loved one who is cleaning things up than have someone stealing their identity. There is so much to handle when someone passes, any impediment makes it more likely someone just brute forces things.
Re: Scrubbing “impolite” data. I lost someone last fall who was a data nut (tons of personal and professional videos and photos). We joked about finding their porn stash, but mostly we got drunk clicked around, and laughed at them flubbing a take at a work video, I cried a bit at a motorcycle maintenance list they never got to, that kind of thing. End of life is messy and gross. If it doesn’t carry jail time I can promise you no one will care whats on the computer after cleaning the endless bodily fluids out of the bed and carpet.
I may pattern the backups of some drives, but there’s no way I’m going to have enough space to do that for 20+ TB of media. I like my media archive, I’ve spent a long time building it, but having the main drive, the local backup in a RAID, and an offsite is probably where that will end. The offsite will probably be a monthly one so that should help.
On the other hand, I am working on cool genealogy project through gramps, which is intended to be a “forever archive” kind of thing. That I may pattern as the data would be incredibly difficult to replace and there’s an increased chance of non-malicious issues given I’ll be opening it up to extended family of varying technical expertise. THAT I may pattern more extensively the way you suggest.