Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Delphi 2009 = A good test of my backup strategy

I installed Delphi 2009 today. In a fit of enthusiasm, I installed it onto my Delphi 2007 virtual machine...

That turned out not to be such a smart move. Not only did d09 fail to install (stopping 1/2 way through with a 'failed to find setup.msi' error), but it trashed my d07 install as well. I don't know how bad the trashing was, I killed delphi after the 10th "package not found error" on start up.

I am not blaming CodeGear for this, my D07 install was "customised" to fit on a small virtual machine, with several, possibly important, folders deleted, and with little free space remaining.

One of the many nice things about using a virtual machine is the ease of backups and recovery. In this case, it came down to a 2 step process
  1. Copy fridays backup onto the computer
  2. Use subversion to retrieve all the files changed since friday
Total elapsed time to recover was about 10 minutes, most of which was spent making coffee while waiting for the files to copy.

Moral of the story: If you are installing D2009 (or any other version), put it in a virtual machine.
And use version control
And backup regularly

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Backups are always a good idea, but I installed Delphi on my desktop along side Delphi 2007 just fine.

Very odd.

Anonymous said...

Hi Jim,

I did have installed D2009 alongside D2007 and I didn't get any errors an installation.

Your problem looks like a search path issue, maybe D2009 is loadind D2007 binaries / dll ?

Anonymous said...

After installing D2009 alongside D2005 I have problems in D2005 when switching between Form View and sourcecode! This takes now a couple of seconds, seems to be some problems of resizing windows.

Anonymous said...

I like how the title unfairly implies that D2009 messed up your system. Good job on that. I guess "Backup before you install any major new software" wouldn't have attracted as many clicks.

Anonymous said...

Because of the complexity of my D2007 installation with 3rd party components, and the 50% failure rating I give to Delphi installs, I don't even do updates anymore. I am terrified to do an update. I did my D2009 test installation on another machine. I have a ton of other reasons why I won't upgrade to D2009, and I will not go into them here, since I put a lengthy post on another site. But, until CodeGear comes up with a more stable solution for installing their software, I will not be proceeding forward with them in the future. I used to hear about people who were still using versions of Delphi that are 5-8 years old, those reasons were probably economic. I too will be sticking with an older version, but not because of economic reasons but out of pure install fear.

Anonymous said...

I agree - your title is a little "too dramatic".

I installed D2009 (in a VM) without any problem. In fact i started last week with the trial download and when I received my sa key yesterday, I followed the instructions to "upgrade" using my key.

Who in their right mind would actually install a new release, of any major dev tool, over top of a previous version - really people what are your thinking!!! Wake up people and get with the program - MS VM (for free) or better still VMWare can be a developers best friend, second only to source control. Yes, especially if you're a one-man shop.

So please everybody stop blamming Codegear for your short commings. They aren't perfect and neither are we. Delphi continues to be an outstanding dev tool that continues to evolve.

Anonymous said...

Hi,

You need a lot of space (up to 3.5 GB) on your system drive to install Delphi 2009, because Delphi setup extracts all of the installation files during setup to temp directory.

I got the same error at first time when installing D2009, but when I free some space on my system drive the problem was gone.

Anonymous said...

LOL, I Have Delphi 7, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007 and Delphi 2009 in the same machine (production machine) and everything is fine. Go Delphi, Go Codegear.

Sean said...

It probably was a free space thing. I only had about 2 gig free. I'm not sure why it trashed D07 though.