Split or scatter backups to external drives

[MaxiWheat]

Hello everyone,

 

Here is my situation :

 

I used to make backups for my home computers using external drives which I then brought at work to avoid loosing everything in case of a catastrophy (fire, flood, etc.). I own 4x8TB external drives. I was organizing my things on those drives like that (my computer at home were all Windows) :

 

Drive 1 : 

  Computer1\D\Folder1

  Computer1\E\Folder1

  Computer1\E\Folder2

  Computer2\D\Folder1

 

Drive 2 :

  Computer3\D\Folder1

  Computer3\E\Folder1

  Computer3\E\Folder2

  Computer3\E\Folder3

 

etc...

 

I was able to map complete drives or 2 drives from each computer onto each of my external backup drives. I used rsync to make backups (with cygwin) to minimize the time it takes.

 

But now with Unraid I'm having a hard time thinking how I would organize that. My files are scattered accross multiple drives, my drives sizes don't match the sizes of my backup drives. I'm aware that my arrays is 36TB and my backups 32TB, but I'm currently using 21.6TB on my array, so it should be enough.

 

Same thing goes for my shares, they don't match the external drive sizes.

 

Any idea how I could make my life easier with backups ?

• I would like to be able to make incremental updates (once every 2 months when I bring back my drives at home)
• I would like to not have to think about how I need to "split" my data across my external drives
• I would like my external drives to be readable independently outside Unraid
• Not a hard requirement : If possible, a solution that can run on an other computer on the network (using shares to access files), since my license on the server has a limited number of connected devices, I would not be able to connect all external drives and mount them in Unassigned Devices at the same time

 

Thank you