Summary
Why should you keep your software and systems up to date?
We receive many support calls, and are always happy to assist our customers. We know that you are all very busy with myriad tasks, and keeping your Acronis Cyber Files, Acronis Files Connect, and Acronis MassTransit servers running should require minimal intervention. Our goal is to ensure your servers have minimal down time, but frequently we find that systems maintenance tasks are neglected when things are running smoothly. Sometimes though, there's a problem just waiting to happen when you don't update/hotfix/upgrade. Our software is mission critical for many of you, and by following guidelines below, your servers are less likely to fail.
Description
Here are some of the advantages to keeping your operating system and other software up to date:
- Bug fixes
- Security fixes
- Driver availability, fixes, updates
- Firmware updates
- Enhancements and additional features
- Disk utilities fix filesystem problems and optimization speeds access
- Hardware and architectural changes
- Fewer calls to Support and less downtime
- Fewer upgrade steps when you do apply hotfixes
- And perhaps the most important thing of all, software versions are updated to synchronize with operating system versions and updates. In other words, you wouldn't want to put obsolete parts on your modern car
The most important reason we hear for not upgrading is, "It's working perfectly and I don't want an upgrade to break something!". Now, we've all been burned in this regard, and as such, most of us don't install the first release of any software. Generally most initial release issues are fixed very quickly.
In Support, it's not uncommon for us to open trouble tickets for issues already repaired - either by us, operating system or other vendors. Also, most software developers do adopt an end-of-life policy for old titles - that is, support stops for that product after a set period of time. Older versions of MassTransit were created for Mac OS 9 or Windows 2000. Neither title is supported by Apple or Microsoft. Our end-of-life policies are very liberal, but we eventually must stop supporting older versions.