Cold Storage Backup to Multiple External Drives

[Crunklydunks]

I've got quite a lot of smaller external drives (500GB, 2 TB, 3 TB, etc.) that aren't really worth shucking and taking up SATA ports, so I'm thinking I will use them for backing up data to be kept offsite. This would include a secondary backup of data which I already backup to Crashplan - smaller things like documents, music, photos, etc., and also a primary backup for difficult to replace stuff that is too unwieldy/expensive to backup to the cloud (CrashPlan chokes with massive backup sets and starts to throttle your upload speed pretty badly it seems, even with dedupe turned off, and B2 is fast but pricey - although I may eventually have to consider it for secondary backup of a few TB.) Trouble is, it's a huge PITA to manually keep track of what's been updated and deciding what goes on which drives.

 

It's kind of old school but is there a good backup solution that would let me span my backups to multiple external hard drives on sort of a "insert next disk and press any key to continue" type basis? Ideally something where the files are stored in a format that is easily accessible using only one drive, rather than sort of the proprietary/tarball type methods that can make it extremely time-consuming to recover files and one failed drive can bork the whole thing.

 

Many thanks for any suggestions!