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On today’s Tech, No Babel: Troubleshooting Techniques: Upgrading production software
Both Microsoft and Apple have recently released new versions of their OS. It can be very tempting to upgrade as soon as possible, but you should be careful if your computer is used for live production.
[tweet “When should you update your production software? Probably not when you think:”]
With an OS update, some software will just stop working. Other software will work, but have glitches. Some hardware might quit working as well.
Before you update, list the most important software you have. Do you use ProPresenter, Photoshop, or some other software? Check with each vendor to see if they’ve not only tested the software with the new version, but tested it with hardware that you’re using. Especially with Windows, there are so many configurations that it’s possible you’d have a configuration that mostly works, but the part that doesn’t is something like a capture card or another mission-critical piece.
That’s why you should never update on the first day. You should also update with the most possible time to spare. That way, if something breaks, you have days, not minutes to fix it.
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Transcript: Not long ago, Apple released their latest version of their OS X called El Capitan. I’ve seen a lot of people … In fact, I’ve gotten some of these questions from people that, as soon as it came out, they rushed and upgraded, and they ran into problems. I thought that we would talk about that real quick. First off. Any time new software comes out or an upgrade, if everything is working fine this is a potential area of problem. Just as things are upgraded sometimes they inadvertently break things, how they work together.
If you think of it like as a sports analogy, if one of your players gets really a lot better, it could be the rest of the team just don’t know how to act, because they’re used to that person being okay. Now, all of a sudden, they’re certainly much better so they don’t really use everything at their disposal yet, because they’re just not used to it. Likewise, if the play was written for the average guy to only run at a certain speed, but he’s gotten faster, then that might just mess up things. It’s certainly the case that even when things work well, they can sometimes cause problems.
My first piece of advice when it comes to upgrading production software is wait a little bit of time. Don’t necessarily upgrade immediately, unless there’s something that, “Oh oh, it turns out this is a security patch, and right now we’ve got a problem where everyone’s system is getting hacked.” That’s different, but if it’s something where you can wait a couple of days to listen to see how things are going, that’s what I would do. I would wait a couple of days.
Next thing I would do is I would make sure I have a good backup. If something goes wrong, it’s always good to know, “No harm, I’ll just undo what I did and then everything will be fine.” Having a good backup is something that’s really good. When it comes to pieces of software, or even the OS X, see how available older versions are. For some companies like … I can’t think of the specific example, but for some companies they keep a list of all their older versions. If you’ve got a problem with the newer version, you can just download the older one, reinstall it, no problem.
This just occurred to me about the time where this happened to me. On Tuesday shows, I do screen cast, and I use Camtasia to do that. Camtasia had an upgrade about a year ago that when I went to export, it would just sit there. Letting it go for hours, no change whatsoever. Don’t know what it was, whether it was my system. They said that they hadn’t heard of this before, but I went back to the older version and it worked fine. Subsequently, they did a couple of new updates and that fixed the problem. The fact that I could go back a version, fixed the problem, and knowing where that is.
Likewise, in my church we don’t ever upgrade to the latest version, the latest bug fixes, et cetera of purpose in our … Right before Sunday service. In fact, we keep the previous version in an archive on another computer, in case we do the upgrade, or it doesn’t work, or breaks one of the things we need, or maybe we were using an undocumented feature and the undocumented feature went away, anything like that. It’s worth having a previous version. We just keep one ready to go should an upgrade cause a problem.
Another thing I want you to consider is don’t upgrade right before something [mission 00:04:48] critical. This is for church, right before the weekend service, don’t upgrade. Much better to upgrade on a Monday, when you’ve got several days to sort it out. Don’t upgrade when you have a couple of hours. Upgrade when you have days. It’s always better to give yourself more lee way. One of the things that I’m doing is … As I’m recording this, I have not upgraded to the latest version of OS X 10.
I’m a little concerned that I might have a problem with purposing her. I might have a problem with photo shop. I might have a problem with Camtasia. These are all things that I use on a daily basis. What I’m doing instead is I’m pre-recording about a month’s worth of content. That way, I can have it ready to go. As I upgrade, if I need to roll back, I’ve got a few days. In fact, if it takes me a week, no problem. I’ve got a few days to do that. I could go as long as 3 weeks without too many problems. That’s something else for you to consider, to plan enough time that you can fix whatever breaks in the update.
Finally, I want you to consider not putting off an update indefinitely. This is the opposite of one of my other earlier points, because a lot of times updates have security updates. I was in a discussion with someone in a church tech board, and he said, “Oh I just never update my system. If it don’t break, don’t fix it.” The problem though is with software, it is broken. All software is broken. The thing is, it’s just not apparent how it’s broken.
You might a security flaw that initially no big deal, because no one knows about it, but over time, there are hackers that are pounding away on these things, and the software company realizes that there’s a problem. When they realize that there’s a problem, they can fix the problem. If you never upgrade, you’re just leaving yourself wide open. There’s a guy that I have interacted with quite a bit and he said, “Well, once something quits being supported, it gets secure.” Nope, it gets less secure.
I am sorry, but with closer software, you really can’t patch stuff like that. If it was open source, by all means you can make all the patches that you want, but with closer software like Windows XP was very stable for a long time, but as it’s not being supported you have no choice but to upgrade. That’s just the way that it is. Maybe you put off upgrading for a good long time, that’s fine, but there comes a point where you just have to upgrade.
I hope all those things are things that can help you. I hope that now you’re thinking, “Okay. Should I wait upgrade?” Maybe. “Should I upgrade today? Maybe. Just answer those questions.
