Veritas System Recovery is wonderful and I rely on it extensively, however, it falls down hard in adequately managing the available space of drives to which it writes backups. In other words, it's really bad at intelligently and automatically clearing sufficient disk space so it can write backups.
For example, even when Manage Backup Destination, Settings, Monitor disk space usage for backup storage is enabled, and Automatically optimize storage is also enabled, when the size of a backup increases (which invariably happens over time), VSR is unable to realize that it should clear more space by deleting more previous backups. It's a total PITA to constantly have to monitor VSR on multiple machines to ensure there's sufficient disk space for it to write backups. It should manage these details itself.
I prefer the approach that Macrium Reflect backup implements. Reflect simply deletes the oldest backup on the target drive when available disk space drops below 5%. Simple, easy, done.
Macrium, unlike VSR, also gets around the problem of a target backup drive lacking space to hold two backups. AFTER a backup, VSR is designed to delete the oldest backup to clear enough space for the next backup. But when there's only enough space for one backup on a target backup drive, VSR's unintelligent behaviour is to start a backup, which will predictably fail because there isn't enough space on the target backup drive. Instead, it would work better for VSR to look ahead and calculate how much data will be backed up, maybe also check recent backups to see their size, and then VSR intelligently deletes a previous backup, even if it's the only remaining backup on the target drive. This way, the backup will write to the target backup drive, no matter what, which is really the goal - to get a successful backup!
What do you think?
