FreeBSD, Who is it for?

[SDK Chan]

Imagine having a production machine go down with no good way to restore things other than a complete reinstall from scratch or a good handle on ZFS snapshots. If it's a non-production machine that you don't mind spending time on, sure, go ahead, practice, make mistakes, and learn. But if your job is on the line, you gotta make damn sure you can put things back exactly as they were if the change you introduce does not work out as intended. And if you can't do that, just leave the machine alone.

I thought making backups before breaking things is a natural step to do.
Sure you can use ZFS snapshots, but machines don't having snapshot capabilities could do a complete sync of the machine with rsync for example.
Another step would be doing a backup file before editing the source in the case you really break something.
If you update you could create a boot environment backup in case.
With the necessary precaution steps breaking things shouldn't usually be that harmful as you should be able to restore the state previour to changes.

 

[astyle]

I thought making backups before breaking things is a natural step to do.
Sure you can use ZFS snapshots, but machines don't having snapshot capabilities could do a complete sync of the machine with rsync for example.
Another step would be doing a backup file before editing the source in the case you really break something.
If you update you could create a boot environment backup in case.
With the necessary precaution steps breaking things shouldn't usually be that harmful as you should be able to restore the state previour to changes.

My take is, if you notice that people get hesitant and cagey about making changes on a production machine, that reflects the amount of confidence they have in their own backups and ability to recover from a mistake.

Common sense is nowhere near as common as you'd expect it to be. Yeah, having backups that you can actually use is 'common sense'. But reality is, it does take a lot of resources to create a usable backup. So maybe the 'common' part of 'common sense' is a bit of a misnomer.