Hey professional DIT here
Don't cascade copy, that makes multiple backups pointless on one level (sure, you're protected if you physically lose one, but if there's a bad copy on your first generation, that gets copied to all other drives). I know that Hedge etc will verify that one copy, but it's not worth taking the risk with any footage, IMO
The quickest solution would be:
• throw any Lacie Ruggeds in the rubbish bin.
That's an extreme statement and I appreciate that you might not have much in the way of budget. But the bottleneck of those drives is MASSIVE.
Get G-Tech USB-C drives. You need drives with a power supply, because Ruggeds or similar run power and data through the same cable. Massively slow.
The even quicker version (for transcoding) would be to buy 2x G-Techs for your backups, and have 1x SSD scratch drive (say a 1TB drive).
Back up to all 3, then run your transcodes from and to the SSD.
Agree with Robin – Hedge is excellent. Would definitely recommend it over Shotput. Silverstack is amazing but even I'm not sure if I can afford it right now (and it's a steep learning curve)
Hope that helps somewhat. Shout if you need more!