(Real Life) Disaster Management

[Richard Bruns]

It occurs to me that we are almost entirely dependent on the Apolyton website. If something happened to the site or the information stored on their servers, the project would be in a lot of trouble. We would lose almost all of the discussion, models, and project work. We might not even be able to contact each other. I think we should take steps to minimize the impact of something happening to the site:

1) Keep backup copies of important model work on our hard drives.

2) Find another website and forum we could use in an emergency.

3) Know how to contact all of the project members.

I'll work on backing up the important stuff from the Technology, Population, and Ecology models.

[Mark_Everson]

Richard:

Its good to think about these things, but they are most already covered IMO.

1) I think all the model leads keep their own model docs. Probably several versions going back too. So unless you mean each model lead keeping copies of the relevant discussion threads, I don't understand your issue 1. In terms of the discussions on the forum, backups are Very important. But I already have IE cache every page I read. And since I read pretty much the entire forum, it is already backed up. We have been able to recover several threads that became dysfunctional that way.

2) Kull has all the files for the website. Setting up a mirror web site is a lot of work, and unless Apolyton were to go down for an extended period of time, I think the work in setting up an alternate would be pretty much wasted. Getting another forum is very easy if we needed to do it. And we could use the old forum, which is still functional, in a pinch. Again, the work to set an alternate forum up is IMO not worth it since the liklihood of a long-term Apolyton disaster seems slim.

3) I already have everyone's email addresses. Anyone who has saved or cached the team page on the web site can do this.

Hope this addresses your concerns...

[Richard Bruns]

1) In my experience, IE caches are very unreliable. But if someone else can get then to work better, that takes care of that concern.

2) I didn't mean to set up a new forum and website; I meant that we should have a plan for where to go and backups for setting them up if we needed to. I don't know about the old forum, so I wouldn't know where to go.

3) We should probably make sure we have the e-mail addresses stored somewhere else. (See #1)

[roquijad]

IMO the crucial things are:

1)having all e-mails (covered)
2)having model documents backed-up (covered:each model's duke does so)
3)having model codes backed-up (I assume each coder has all that in their own PCs)
4)each model duke should have at least a list of the important decisions made in forum threads. Probably this is the only thing not covered.