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Backups!

I had a very nearly catastrophic lesson today in the essential need for regular backups, having got back from lunch to see my computer had not only disconnected itself from the network, but on a restart, had completely fouled up the file allocation table for the boot drive.

All the normal diagnostic techniques failed me, and having not seen the "error reading boot drive" blue screen of death before, I was at a loss of how to fix this. One quick trip to the IT department and in pops a specially built live boot disc. Interestingly, (at least it was for myself) the live disc was a Linux variant, purposely built for the compter environment I work in.

The reason I found this interesting, was that it was the first time I'd seen Linux deployed or used anywhere outside of the web server setup. In my previous job I worked as the senior web developer in a design company. The MD of said company was quite anti-Linux, refusing to notice the advantage of Linux, or indeed any open-source technologies. His argument? Lack of support. For him, something which was free did not offer the right level of customer support, if any, but if you bought Windows, you could always ring them if you ran into trouble. Now, I've been using Linux myself as my main OS for over a year, and I would say I have a better knowledge of it than most people do of the more typical Windows, so I regard this remark as more than a little ridiculous. One only has to look at the license agreement in Windows to realise that they don't offer any guarantees and you are pretty much on your own if the proverbial muck hits the fan and your Windows install causes real problems (one I remember being "loss of life", which seems a little extreme surely?)

Forgetting the somewhat harsh license agreement (and most people never really read them anyway), just consider how much technical support actually costs for Windows, when more often than not, you are given a generic answer along the lines of "not our software causing the problem". To be honest, if I run into a problem with a computer, the tech support company for a particular brand of software is usually the last place I call on, preferring to use the wonderful Google instead, and I think this is probably what most people do. So, paying for a copy of software does not necessarily bring me any advantage in this respect. Sure, a fair few more people use the proprietary software in the main, but the technical know-how of most people who use Linux is typically of a higher caliber, so the results of a Google (and I use the term in its new verb sense) are pretty much even across the board. So if there are no major apparent advantages in this respect for proprietary software, then perhaps it is time to look at what real disadvantages there actually are.

So, the lesson I learned? Well, make regular backups, of course, but the main thing was that the best way to get the job done is to use the best tool for the job. Open source software is steadily gaining more acceptance not for its price, but for its technical superiority, particularly in areas that closed source cannot compete in.