

This is a good compromise. When I was tight on backup space, I just had a “backup” script that ran nightly and wrote all the media file names to a text file and pushed that to my backup.
It would mean tons of redownloading if my storage array failed, but it was preferable to spending hundreds of dollars I didn’t have on new hardware.

Set up a job to write the file names of everything in your file system to a text file and make sure that text file gets backed up. I did that on my Unraid server for years in lieu of fully backing up the whole array.