Open Directory Toasted Without Backups

The Open Directory Project has operated under various names, but its latest incarnation managed at AOL has earned a new name: FUBAR.

post by Skrenta about the nine lives of DMOZ highlighted some problems being experienced by the directory he started several years ago. Hardware issues and non-existent backup appear to be the culprits: Apparently the machine holding dmoz in AOL ops crashed. Standard backups had been discontinued for some reason; during unsuccessful attempts to restore some of the lost data, ops blew away the rest of the existing data on the system. So for the past 6 weeks, a few folks have been trying to patch the system back together again (reverse engineering from the latest RDF dump, I suppose). But 6 weeks is a very long outage.... dmoz doesn't exactly operate on a model of transparency, to say the least, so they have been keeping the details of what happened private. The closest anyone seems to be getting to lamenting a possible DMOZ demise is the Irish wake of cheers being expressed earlier in December by people like Sean Bolton at posted from then through today. Moderators have been repeating a "we do not have an ETA" message intermittently. Attempts to suggest a URL in a category hit a "Service Temporarily Unavailable" page, just as they have since October. Tag: Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Bookmark Murdok: David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.