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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

When things like this happen, is it any wonder an increasing number of users are viewing any sort of "updates" with extreme apprehension? "It was working fine just before, and now I've lost everything. Why should I have even updated!?!?"

I still remember when the general advice was "do not upgrade/change what works, unless you need something in a later version", which then changed to "updates are recommended", followed by "updates are strongly recommended", and more recently, "updates are mandatory".

Adobe isn't alone, Microsoft had done worse not long ago --- with a forced update too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18148376

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139

(On the flip side, at least you're able to run file recovery programs on a PC.)

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I definitely feel the increasing apprehension and postpone updates for as long as possible all the time.

But the change to "mandatory updates" came after numerous incidents of "millions of users running unpatched software fell victim to the latest exploit". This kind of bad publicity started the trend of software makers forcing updates on users.

Separating security patches from feature updates is better but doesn't 100% guarantee there are no data-losing bugs.

> Separating security patches from feature updates is better but doesn't 100% guarantee there are no data-losing bugs.

It's a nice thought to separate "security" and "feature" updates, but I'm not sure if its realistically achievable.

----

Looking at the bigger picture, I think the issue is that once developers/managers got into the habit of forcing updates on users, it became an excuse for skimping on QA/QC. "If there's any bugs, we can just fix them in the next release". But there's a huge difference between internally finding a bug, analyzing its potential impact, then deciding it isn't a blocker and expecting your users to find bugs for you.

That would be really, really hard and would require a tremendous amount of additional organization in the dev process. Either that or fixes would need to be back ported to every running supported version. That's insane.

I don't quite follow. Was that supposed to be a reply to the parent instead of me?

> "updates are recommended", followed by "updates are strongly recommended", and more recently, "updates are mandatory".

This is 5 years old, today we are doing:

Updates happen in background automatically without user knowing and sometimes when autoupdated software is being used at the time, it crashes when new action is performed and all not saved user data is lost.

Move fast, break things!

That's my experience every time Firefox updates these days through unattended-upgrades. The sad thing is that it handled it just fine without crashing up until a few years ago.

A quick scroll trough the settings page shows me you can turn the automatic updates off if you want. Also not something i've experienced. Have you checked whether the crash isn't caused by some weird addon or the like?

The problem is caused when Firefox is installed through your operating system's package manager. But after a bit of searching, it looks like you can just get a version of Firefox from Mozilla's website that contains its own updater and avoids this problem.

https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/b5jb7i/how_to_prev...

> Updates happen in background automatically without user knowing ... Move fast, break things!

This is exactly why power users dislike SNAP.

Give us the ability to choose if/how/when to install updates. Period.

SNAP the Ubuntu thing?

Yes.

On the audio production side of things... people are still pretty skittish when it comes to upgrades. I like to think of an audio production system as an appliance rather than a computer.

There's a quote from George Sanger that goes something like "the difference between an appliance and a computer is that a computer breaks down more often". He was speaking about audio production. There's a photo in his book of a computer with a sign taped to it saying, in explicit words, to NOT upgrade the computer, because it is running GigaSampler and he would very much like to keep running GigaSampler.

On a side note, I think that will make the Intel Macs still valuable for years to come.

Audio production software is notoriously conservative when it comes to updates.

That's partly because many plugins won't be updated and if you need to revisit a project and didn't bounce stems back then you'll be out of luck.

This is what I came to comment as well. I understand security updates to prevent the haxors from taking over. Even still, I wait for these exact warnings that update are bad. The forced automatic updates are the scariest thing to me. Luckily, on the desktop, they still allow the user to update at their discretion. I never ever ever update my Adobe software in the middle of projects. I once updated in the middle of a feature film edit that was put on hold, but went back to it after an update to Premiere. There were enough oddities with the new version that made me roll back to a previous version.

Backups are a necessity, and I don't blame the users but it would definitely help mitigate risks when it comes to updating software. I am an update fanatic running Arch and constantly keep all my software up-to-date. Fortunately, I've never had any issues, but if I do I have both Google Drive synced via rclone and Crashplan to help me recover.

While I agree with you and do myself keep several backups, I get the feeling that this is actually more and more difficult to implement for "regular people".

Related to TFA's subject, I'm a user of Lightroom and Photoshop, but the computer-based, "classic" ones. I still manage my photos "the old way", with folders on my drive that I back up regularly to two locations.

However, I also tried Lightroom on my iPhone. Right now, if I were asked, I would not know how to go about backing up those pictures, aside from doing a full phone backup. Also, the marketing speak for adobe's cloud (and indeed, for every similar offering out there) is "keep your data secure / safe". So as a regular user, how would I know that's actually "not secure enough" and that "synced to the cloud" is not actually backed up?

The actual language on the latest Lightroom iPhone app is "Synced and backed up". But given Canon lost their customer's photos the other day, how much can you actually count on those backups being actual backups? My point is that we should indeed try to educate users and not blame them for this kind of problem happening, but maybe we should actively blame companies for the deceiving language they use while at the same time rendering user's data harder and harder to manage.

>how much can you actually count on those backups being actual backups?

You can not count at it at all. The only legit option glacier honestly.

The conversation went in exactly the same direction 3 days ago when we were discussing Canon's recent loss of user data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196557

G Suite is FedRAMP compliant. AWS isn't doing anything different or better and isn't any more trustworthy. Additionally, as I mentioned I also backup off-site using CrashPlan but may eventually change to another provider like Wasabi, B2 or potentially just JottaCloud.

Break things fast...

It's terrible when it happens, but it's important not to focus too much on one risk. A software update deleting your work isn't the only risk, and it's probably not the most common risk.

For an iPhone or iPad, the device getting lost or broken is probably the most common issue. Avoiding updates won't be of any help if that happens. Keeping backups will help for more risks.

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