We all heard that saying “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch“, but I beg to differ!  While this may have been true during time like “The Great Depression”, it no longer true in a country like American.

That said, many people still believe the old saying and take it to heart.  In fact, I was helping a friend implement a free backup solution that would saved him thousands of dollars for his small business, but he changed his mind almost right after I got the first phase of it installed.

Here is what happened! 

I went down to his business office, setup a workstation that he had as a server that would be the backup server, installed the software needed (all free), and then scripted out the process for the automated backup to work for his first business workstation to be backed up (as a test).

I took most of the human element out of it by having it backup to an external hard drive that someone would switch out with another hard drive in the morning.  This process would then be alternated daily, with one of the hard drives always in my friend’s car.  It was a good free solution.

My friend decided to hire a part-time office clerk and have system backups fall underneath the office clerk/warehouse guy’s responsibilities.  Well the new hire didn’t know anything about how to backup a computer and turned off the machine I setup off.

They recently had a problem with their workstation, but no backup system was in place so all of their invoicing files were lost…

The of course we have the following list of software that is free and incredible:

• WordPress – What is WordPress?  The the software that support this blog and others.  Great stuff!
• Open Office – Microsoft compatible free office software.  More Great stuff!
• Linux (in particular Ubuntu), – Linux is an operating system.  I use Ubuntu desktop for many of my needs!
• Apache – Web Server technology, I’m using this as the web server software for wordpress.
• Google – Practically anything google is great and mostly free!
• GIMP – Great Graphic Manipulation software.
• MySQL – SQL Server software (this is now owned by Oracle, so I don’t know how much longer it will be free… sad huh).
• Download.com – I like to query for free software, and the top editor’s picks.  This is more of a windows and mac site by CNN.com
• Sourceforge.net – free software including Linux.

If I owned a business with employees that needed workstations, I would try to go entire with free software, perhaps a mix of 80% free and 20% proprietary.

Readers, what do you think free software, and what is your best suggestion?

-MR

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