---
date: 2012-04-16
title: A Learning Experience
category: Opinions
---

How many times have you installed/updated a bit of software and read the
line "Please take a back up" or something to that effect? 99 times out
of a hundred, you will just continue and ignore it.

Today I had a reminder of why it is import to do so. I did a routine
plug-in upgrade on our Jira installation (Customware Salesforce
connector for those who want to know). I have done this several times, I
had tested it in our Dev installation I was 100% confident it would work
as expected. However, I actually decided to take a backup anyway.

I ran the upgrade in the production environment and re-indexed. Nothing
out of the ordinary. 10% of the way into the index it fell over. Jira's
database was gone! Fortunately I was able to restore from my backup and
at worst a comment or two was lost, but that still caused significant
downtime.

I had done everything I could to make sure the upgrade would go
smoothly, but it still did not. That is why software vendors always tell
you to take a backup before even the smallest change -- DO IT!
