Help - DataVolume HDD Problems - Data Missing

Hi,
my DataVolume disk was for years sitting with 496 errors and 44 unreadable (pending) sections
Device: /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5000c500107c04ba [SAT], 44 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

I understood, that the drive need a low level format, but never got around to it.
Yesterday, the DataVolume was dismounted and i note, that it currently say Smartmon was not enabled and could read the s/n of the drive

I checked the log and see error count increased
Device: /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST31500341AS_9VS0HR4K [SAT], ATA error count increased from 496 to 504

This is probably related to my mrs turning off my UPS during a power outage because of the alarm....don't ask
Anyway, the disk shows 10Gb being used, but the directories are empty or not there.

i'm guessing the directory table is damaged...but where do i go from here?
I have been making a rsync backup of the drive (so i have one from yesterday) - lucky the drive error caused to rsync to not delete the files.

i've swapped the disk out, but of course the "File System" shows has missing.
Am i able to re-assign it to the new disk?

I need to restore the user home directories, mysql, and a bunch of other stuff.

I can't get the new disk to mount, cause it keeps referring to the old GUID.

I managed to change the UUID to the original one and used rsync to restore all the data directories.
I am stuck getting mysql to start...although i don't understand, cause plexmedia and OMV web are both working.

i have a mysqldump to restore, but keeps giving me below error, so i can't even restore
ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib /mysql/mysql.sock' (111)

Yes, I struggled but managed to get an empty system installed and have managed to restore everything.

There has to be a better way than this, for doing full backups. I have separate RSYNC jobs for various Shared Folders on the data volume, then a separate async script to do the MySQL backup and backup of associate up togethers to ensure their integrity.

But the restore process is ridiculous. I had to great a separate restore job for each backup job, and then the MySql restore required debugging to understand why i wasn't able to restore the db.

Surely, there must be better seemless backup solutions for linux?