WW_Watcher - 10:25 pm on Dec 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

jimnoble

The boxes are AOL's, The tape/media is AOL's, the professionals who are in charge of them from AOL(and there is a debate if there are any of those), are responsible for working with the ODP Programmers, DBAs, & SysAdmins to get a a list of what to backup, and when, and then ripping it off to another media. This requires a collaboration of people to accomplish this task, so that the applications & data are restorable.

All large databases are a pain to backup, and restore, but this is not new news, and everyone who values their systems have worked out processes to cure these issues. It is not enough to rely totally on raid arrays & multiple boxes for hardware failures, you have to have good backups, you have to test your backups, or face what the ODP is facing now. This is all I am saying. If AOL/ODP have not fixed the backup/restore issues, it can happen again anytime.

If I was still in my previous profession, I would be using the current problems of AOL/ODP as examples to my clients to justify the cost of preparation for any disaster.

I place no blame for the current ODP problems on the editors. From my perspective, You/They are just the users of an application, nothing more.

Back to Watching
WW_Watcher

Edit to add,
I also consider the editors the only people who suffered during the outage. It made no difference to the DMOZ, other than being another strike to its reputatation.

[edited by: WW_Watcher at 10:32 pm (utc) on Dec. 19, 2006]