okay, so what i am looking for is a little advice on the best set-up for my network.

let me set this up...so i have a small network that includes a server which currently houses a plex server, 10 hard drives worth about 30-50 tbs that is about 50% full. i also have a pc with about 6 hard drives worth about 20 tb and is maybe 35% full with a dual boot with win 7 that i need to use sometimes. lastly i have a backup pc running bacula that backs up the entire network sporting about 50 tbs that is over 50% full. i really like having a full copy of my music on my pc. if it is only on my server, when i am say rebuilding it, i lose access to my music (about 500+ gbs in size) for quite a bit of time and i dont like that. so i really want a full copy of my music on my pc.

on the server is a plex server, web server, samba server...quite a few others. on my pc is my music which i would like to serve from my pc to my server. so right now i have it set-up to mount via /etc/fstab over the network to the server as ro so nothing can change. between these and other computers i have unison running keeping my home folders synced between all of them.

the problem i seem to be having is when i have to say boot into windows and work for a while, the issue is not that it is in windows and that samba mount is dead for all intents and purposes, it is that when i boot back into linux and have the samba server running again, it doesnt seem to refresh that mount and it SEEMS to kind of lie there dead and not being updated.

further, occasionally will notice that my music will not update on plex which leads me to believe that the link is dead and will not refresh and so i have to restart or remount all the drives to get access via plex again.

i am not sure if i have the samba mounts set up wrong or what but if i do, what is a better way to do this so that i have access to my music via plex? would it be better to say set up rsync to sync my music to the server and have two complete copies?

anyone have any thoughts about a better way to set this up so i have access via plex and my pc for all of the music?

From the mount.cifs man pages
As far as I know if the server shuts down the client does not automatically remount or try to reconnect back to the server. remounting is the only way I know how to fix the problem.

Using autofs or systemd x-systemd.automount might work since shares will automatically unmount after idle timeout expires.