Central catalog and backup spanning multiple disks

Hi,

I am a happy user of restic for a couple of years now, thanks for the great tool. Recently, I thought about the problem that my NAS data will soon not fit onto a single 16TB USB HDD any more. Considering the current storage prices and the fact that I have a couple of 4TB and 1 TB drives from past times, I thought about splitting backups.

Is there an existing solution like a central catalog tool which allows to search for files and than points me to a drive I need to mount? Basically, splitting the catalog from the actual backup.

For the backup process, ideally I would just mount a disk with some remaining space and the new files would go there.

I think I could build something with rclone and union mounts, but that would require to mount all disks concurrently, which I don’t really want. Also, I don’t want to loose all data if a single drive fails.

Last but not least, I need to integrity check repos from time to time, but if it would be just a restic repo, that might be the easiest task.

I appreciate all ideas :slight_smile:

To be honest: all of these sound like terrible ideas. A backup only counts if you can be sure it works when you need to restore. If it was possible to split the parts of your repo up or - and this is possible - combine those drives using lvm or something like that, you’d get a situation where your backup is worthless if only one of those drives fails.

If your data is important to you, you’ll have to invest some money. Or maybe you can mirror two of the 4TB drives, put the important stuff there and then leave the lower prio stuff on the 16TB single drive?

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