Backup is important because it protects your data from being lost or damaged. Data can be lost or damaged due to many reasons, such as hardware failure, software error, human error, virus attack, natural disaster, theft, or sabotage. If you lose your data, you may face serious consequences, such as losing your work, your memories, your money, or your reputation. Backup helps you avoid these consequences by creating copies of your data and storing them in a safe place. If something happens to your original data, you can use the backup copies to restore your data and continue your activities. Backup gives you peace of mind and security.

The CA backup and restore plugin is a tool that helps you save copies of your appdata folder and get them back if your cache drive breaks. It also lets you save copies of your USB flash drive and your VM libvirt image. You can get it from the Community Applications app store on Unraid. The plugin uses tar to make smaller files of your appdata folder and puts them in a place you choose. You can make the plugin save copies automatically and remove old copies after a new copy is made. You can also check if the files are good after making them. To get the plugin, you need to go to the Apps tab on your Unraid server and look for Appdata Backup. You will see two versions: v2 by Squid and v2.5 by KluthR. The v2 version is old and not working well, so you should get the v2.5 version by KluthR. Before getting the plugin, you should save a copy of your flash drive, just in case something goes bad. To use the plugin, you need to change some settings, like where your appdata folder is and where you want to put the files, how often and when you want to save copies, how small you want the files to be, if you want to check the files after making them, and if you want to remove old copies. You can also choose to save copies of your flash drive and libvirt image to different places. You can change these settings from the Settings tab on your Unraid server.

To get back your appdata folder, flash drive or libvirt image, you need to go to the Restore tab on your Unraid server and pick the file you want to get back from. You can also choose to get back only some containers or files from the file. The plugin also has some extra features, like custom scripts, multicore backup, treesize view, docker templates backup, and diagnostic functions. You can find more information about these features on the plugin support thread.

I set up two shares that are responsible for housing my Appdata and flash drive contents, with these files I can restore the OS and all docker containers to a working and configured state if something goes wrong. After the weekly backups are completed the files are copied using Rclone which is a tool that helps you work with files on cloud storage using the command line. It works with many cloud storage providers, such as S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and more. It can do things like copy, sync, move, check, mount, and encrypt files on the cloud. Rclone has many features that make it a strong and flexible tool for cloud storage. It can check if files are good using hashes, keep timestamps, continue transfers, use server-side transfers, make files smaller and safer, and more. It also has a web GUI and an API for easier use. Rclone is an open-source software written in Go. It is based on rsync and has a friendly support community. It is updated often and has beta versions for trying new features.

To use rclone on Unraid to copy to AWS S3, you need to do these steps:

• Get the rclone plugin on your Unraid server. You can find it in the Community Applications app store or use a link.
• Make rclone work with your AWS S3 account. You can use the command rclone config and answer the questions. You will need to type your AWS access key ID, secret access key, region, and endpoint.
• Make a bucket on AWS S3 where you want to put your files. You can use the AWS web console or the command rclone mkdir remote:bucket, where remote is the name of your rclone remote and bucket is the name of your bucket.
• Put your files from Unraid to AWS S3 using the command rclone copy source: remote:bucket, where source is the place of your local files and remote and bucket are the same as before. You can also use other commands like rclone sync or rclone move depending on what you want.
• If you want, you can connect your AWS S3 bucket as a network disk on Unraid using the command rclone mount --allow-other remote:bucket /path/to/local/mount &, where remote, bucket, and /path/to/local/mount are the same as before. You can also let your docker containers use your rclone mount by telling them the place of the mount point in the docker container interface.

I also set up some configuration to allow for only the 3 latest backups to be stored and the rest automatically deleted to save on costs and storage, and excluding Plex metadata saves many many gigabytes. I also like to make a manual copy on an external drive using the 'unassigned devices' plugin, just for added safety. The final result is a seamless and automatic backup system that can be encrypted and restored from with only a few clicks!