Small Business Server 2008 Backups

I just watched Sean Daniels' video on some of the new SBS 2008 features, where he gives a sneak peek of the new backup procedure. He mentions that it is snapshot-based using VSS and geared towards (multiple) external USB/FireWire drives. This brought up a few immediate concerns for me:

1. It sounds like it could re-introduce some of the hassles that differential and incremental backups used to pose for many tape users. My understanding was that SBS tried to remove this complexity by enforcing daily full backups.
2. External drives are generally IDE/SATA based and have a relatively high failure rate (often due to poor cooling). What happens when one fails? What if it’s the one that contains your very first backup?

I'll post the answers to these questions as soon as I have them...

UPDATE: In response to my questions, Sean has been kind enough to start a FAQ here: http://sbs.seandaniel.com/2008/03/small-business-server-2008-backup-q.html.

The short version is that both of these issues have been addressed by including a full backup on each bacup drive from which the incremental backups on the same drive are calculated. Only one good drive is required for a complete restore.

Universal Feature Wishlists (UFWs)

In my brief quest to find the ultimate blogging and photo sharing combination I found many excellent applications that either have a deal-breaking flaw or require some kludge of a workaround to fit them into a particular workflow. More often than not, my search for an elegant solution only turned up more people with the same unresolved issues. After several days of searching for perfection, I had a bit of a revelation - every piece of software and every web application does certain things well, and others not so well.

Obvious, perhaps, but it made me question why nobody has created a Universal Feature Wishlist (UFW) - some kind of categorized, wiki-style poll database where anyone can add new ideas for functionality, vote for existing ones or give kudos to those that have implemented something brilliantly.

For example, I think that online photo albums like Picasa Web Albums should have a template system to personalize their look, and to allow for the kind of scripting required by Google Analytics. I also think that the template and layout interface used on Blogger is excellent - it allows for easy point-and-click editing as well as direct modification of the HTML code. Marrying the two would be brilliant!

I suppose I could send the vendor a feature request, but the likelihood of getting it implemented is probably pretty low. However, I suspect if there was an established UFW, your chances would increase dramatically since the competition would likely be working on the same thing too. Vendors would start competing over the quality of the features, rather than the quantity, and we would eventually end up with fewer bugs and faster code. And, if open source developers and hobbyists had access to this kind of information, we would probably see a lot more of those rare applications that make you think "Wow, this is exactly what I was looking for!"

Fantastic. Now that I've solved all the world's software problems I just need to find a UFW to determine the features that will be included in the first UFW...