1. A computer program embodied on a computer readable medium, comprising: program instructions for allocating one or more backup LUNs identified in a backup management file from one or more available LUNs identified in a universe file; and program instructions for allocating one of the plurality of the data containers for a current backup of a dataset; wherein the backup management file comprises a plurality of data containers, each data container specifying a subset of the one or more backup LUNs capable of backing up the dataset comprising one or more used dataset LUNs.