In one approach, filesets to be backed up are divided into partitions and snapshots are pulled for each partition. In one architecture, a data management and storage (DMS) cluster includes a plurality of peer DMS nodes and a distributed data store implemented across the peer DMS nodes. One of the peer DMS nodes receives fileset metadata for the fileset and defines a plurality of partitions for the fileset based on the fileset metadata. The peer DMS nodes operate autonomously to execute jobs to pull snapshots for each of the partitions and to store the snapshots of the partitions in the distributed data store.