REALLY?
One of the reasons I was going to buy a WHS system was that I could simply add more drives to the drive pool and increase space for shared folders (naturally with duplication on for safety). Do you mean that if I have a system with 4 1TB drives, only 1TB is available for duplicated shared folders?

That would be annoying.

That’s why you are limited by the primary drive’s size for shared storage. Shared storage can only be placed on the boot drive, and then mirrored to a second drive.

PC Backups on the other hand can be placed (and span) several hard drives, because of the SQL-based storage matrix that it uses.

Unfortunately, if that matrix gets screwed up in the slightest, the Backup Service will crash, and you can be left having to wipe all your old PC Backups out.

I think the best fix for Microsoft would be to implement heuristics and monitor why backup databases/matrices in their system have problems, and write self-monitoring tools to correct those issues.

If you read the Microsoft support article that I linked to, apparently it’s not uncommon (but not necessarily common either).

I do admit I’m not the typical WHS user, WHS helps me test Microsoft software without worry (Vista SP1 and XP SP3 have been running circles around all my systems)… so my backup activity is much more intense than the typical WHS system.

It would be interesting in future versions, though, to have the backup matrix be backed up or archived. I hope the backup wizard in the second release adds support to archiving PC backups to an external hard drive.

There is a registry hack that allows you to enable duplication of backups. This might have helped you in this situation.