I can confirm that this solved the problem:
My old usb stick died and after I copied my backup to a new usb stick I couldn't access my shares on multiple machines, windows and linux ("permission denied").
I could connect to a new share if I used a new user as well (I think I couldn't access the old shares with the new user, but I'm not sure)
I shutdown the unraid machine, took the usb stick to another machine and deleted the four files from the /config folder.
I rebooted the unraid machine and was asked to create a password for root (I took the same as before).
All users (except root, of course) were gone, and I recreated them with the same name/password.
Now all machines connect to the shares again.