Question

Obviously beta is not meant for situations where things are critical, but it seems that the Fog Creek betas are pretty darn stable, and at the very least seem to be free of any data-corruption/data-loss sorts of bugs.

If that is true, is there any danger, other than users being more likely to experience minor bugs and glitches, to using the beta version?

(if my assumption about stability isn't true, please also let me know)

Answer 1

Obvious answer: We endeavor to fix the bugs before releasing the beta. That said, there's always reality:

I'd say the most common problem encountered is features not working (or not working the way you expect). You might use a feature in a way that we didn't anticipate, and we make a change that prevents it from working as before. This always happens.

Other issues could be downtime or loss of availability. Sometimes the new code will crash on your data, leaving your site unavailable until we fix the bug. This usually happens to somebody, but not most people.

For On Demand we keep a series of backups of everyone's database (and you should do this too for Licensed), so if the beta really does eat your data, we can roll back. You might lose a few days of data, but not everything. I'm not aware of any instance of this actually happening.

In my experience, the beta releases may have more bugs than stable releases, but they aren't more severe. The majority of the data corruption bugs I'm familiar with were all discovered long after release.

Answer 2

Edit: Ted's answer suffices. I'll leave this here as additional confirmation:

You are correct that our betas are historically pretty stable.

However, there is always additional risk of these worst-case sorts of bugs when using beta software, and if you're significantly concerned then it might be best to sign up for a new test On Demand and use that to apply for the beta.

We obviously always continue to take backups of all of our data (for On Demand accounts), regardless of beta status.

We've been running these betas internally on Fog Creek's own data for months now, and we certainly jump quickly on any bug that looks like it might be serious.