Implementations are provided herein for a self-healing scalable ring communication topology that enables a multi-stream restartable backup. A standard network management protocol tree-walk process can be altered to support parallel tree-walk. Parallel tree-walk provides for splitting a backup directory among multiple sessions, where each session, in parallel, can walk the tree of portions of a backup directory and stream the results to separate backup storage devices. By allowing multiple backup sessions to work together to back up a single root directory, the backup process becomes more scalable to very large scale data storage systems. In addition, if a single stream of a multi-stream backup experiences a failure, only that stream need be restarted and other streams of the backup can continue without or with very little interruption.