It pains me to admit it, but I broke my own personal rule of survival in the computer age. Not once, but twice in one week. I kid you not.

Don’t update.

It’s that simple. Well, with one qualifier:

Don’t update unless you have a compelling need to do so.

I broke this rule against the better judgement of that same little voice that tells you when you’ve had one too many. Or so I’m told. I don’t drink.

Anyway, the rule is simple and important. Don’t update your software if it’s meeting your needs simply because it’s the latest, coolest version. If it works and does what you need it to do, don’t change anything.

The reason is that upgrading is rarely a good thing unless it’s to plug a security hole, and even then the fix can be worse than the illness. This is because security fixes tend to be bolt-on code, and in my experience that means two things.

1. The program works only as good as the new code, which may not be such a good thing when your application consists of 100,000 lines of source code.
2. The potential for unpleasant interactions in the application and the patches (or upgrades) is magnified by such things as plug-in’s and customizations that can’t be anticipated ahead of time.

In addition to these considerations are the problems that can go with an upgrade to software that already exists in a working setup. I am referring here to the kind of upgrade that is designed to change the functioning of the software on a tangible level, such as the user interface. Hopefully, for the better.

This is where I first broke the all important rule. It happened a couple of weeks ago when some software I was using had an upgrade available. It was a feature upgrade, and a security upgrade. I decided to click the one step upgrade installer and let the application do the upgrade work.

Big mistake.

The application got broke, as in reamed. The Long and the short of it is that the application now couldn’t connect with it’s database. A lesser man wouldn’t be willing to admit the error of his ways. Remember this if you remember nothing else. BACK UP COMPLETELY, BACKUP FREQUENTLY!

I follow my own advice as much as possible, and fortunately, I had made a back up of the application database before the upgrade. I ended up fully reinstalling new application version, and restoring the database with the backup. I then had to get to work reconfiguring everything. Not fun.

It was a not so funny comedy of errors. More like a greek tragedy. Only the fact that I had backed up the database, admittedly in a bass-akward fashion, meant that I eventually recovered a years worth of content creation and development. I dodged a major bullet.

In other news, I really blew it about the same time with my other computer, which runs Ubuntu Linux. I upgraded to a new version of this fine operating system, but the aging computer the old version was running on (quite well thank you very much) just didn’t have the ommf! to make the new version work well. Frankly, it just barfed. Big time. My reason for the upgrade was the worst reason there is, and I know better. I heard it was “better” than the current version running on my computer.

I haven’t gotten to the tortuous task of cleaning up that mess. At this point, I’m too tired from my last flub up.

Here’s to learning from our mistakes,

Denigris