Backups

Karla

This is excellent

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Make backups.


If I could offer you only one tip for the future, backups would be it.

The long-term benefits of backups have been proved by administrators,
whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own
meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your operating system. Oh, never mind. You
will not understand the power and beauty of your operating system until
you've stopped using it. But trust me, in 10 years, you'll look back at
screenshots and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility
lay before you and how fabulous you're operating system was. You are not as
out of touch as you imagine.

Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as
effective as trying to fix a network outage by chewing AOL diskettes.

The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your
worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 2 am on some disastrous Sunday
morning.

Do one thing every day that scares your users.

Script.

Don't be reckless with other people's data. Don't put up with people who
are reckless with yours.

Defragment.

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're operating system is
ahead, sometimes it's behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only
for your benefit.

Remember problems you fix. Forget the complaints. If you succeed in doing
this, tell me how.

Keep your old programs. Throw away your old trouble tickets.

Browse.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your machine.
The most interesting people I know didn't know what they wanted to do with
their 286 machine. Some of the most interesting people I know still don't
know what to do with their mulitprocessor servers.

Get plenty of disk space. Be kind to your 21" monitor. You'll miss it when
it's gone.

Maybe you'll BSOD, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll PANIC, maybe you won't.
Maybe you'll reinstall after 2 months, maybe you'll have your system
running for 5 years. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much,
or berate yourself either. Your uptimes are half chance. So are everybody
else's.

Enjoy your operating system. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of
it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest tool you'll ever
own.

Code, even if you have nowhere to do it but in your cubicle. RTFM, even if
you don't follow it. Do not read advocacy newsgroups. They will only make
you feel annoyed.

Get to know your hardware. You never know when it'll be fried for good. Be
nice to other techies. They're your best link to your past and the people
most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that operating systems come and go, but with a precious few you
should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in performance and
compatibility, because the older your machine gets, the more you need the
operating systems you knew when you were young.

Live in Redmond once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Finland
once, but leave before it makes you cold.

Surf.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Companies are ammoral. Salesmen will
lie. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when
you were young, programmers worked for nothing, and companies respected
their customers.

Respect your customers.

Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a support contract.
Maybe you'll have a knowledgable administrator. But you never know when
either one might run out.

Don't mess too much with your configuration or by the time you're ready to
do some real work, it will crash like crazy.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it.
Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing a dead
operating system from the bit bucket, wiping it off, painting over the ugly
parts and advocating it for more than it's worth.

But trust me on the backups.

Hobbes

LOL You know that play that crap poem on the airplane all the time here.