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Comment by mdc | Hacker News Reader

We use Fogbugz for all our internal project tracking. The consensus among our engineers is that this downtime is understandable and we'd rather deal with it, even in a mission-important web app, than pay more every month to insure redundancy was available.

Frankly this is just making us appreciate Fogbugz all the more since tracking our time without it will be a real PITA.

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I don't know what Fogbugz costs, but they really should start charging for Trello now, esp. if they can use some of that revenue to add geo-redundancy.

Trello is fantastic, but now I'm worried that I'm too dependent on it and I should arrange an offline alternative.

Take my money, Fog Creek.

I totally agree. Did this thing have an export function or should I be prepared creating a scraper?

There is an export-to-JSON, from whose output I'm now trying to salvage my project notes.

There is also a print option, but that doesn't seem to print the back of the cards so it's pretty useless, unless I'm mistaken.

There is an api: trello.com/docs/api

Geo-redundancy is a tough engineering problem. We're building a long term solution but it's a lot of work and it's not in place today.

If this is the kind of problem that excites you, we're hiring :-)

It's particularly hard to shoehorn in after the fact. Certain development models (e.g. replicated state machines) make it much easier... mix in some magic Paxos dust and it can handle machine failures as well.

Sadly the better implementations I've used myself (or have heard about) are not publicly available. The closest thing in semi-widespread use seems to be Zookeeper, but it's more like Oracle when you really wanted SQLite (standalone service vs. library).

How tough it is depends on how you're engineering your geo-redundancy. I've been doing it since 1998 and a simple active-passive solution is not as hard as some would believe but it does cost money. Active-Active is much more challenging and multi-master is obviously the ideal and the most difficult to engineer with geo-network latency. I haven't seen one solution that couldn't be staged to at least provide active-passive DR capability for a pretty reasonable price. You can even do it in EC2, RackSpace Cloud or Joyent if your feeling "cloudy".

Either your engineers are underpaid or you're anticipating a larger price hike than would seem justified to gain the redundancy you need.

Or the engineers want to work on interesting problems, rather than patching the bug tracker every 2 weeks.

In my experience, what self-hosted bug-tracking systems might gain in redundancy (a few hours every time a major storm hits) they lose to context switches (which hit team morale, not merely time.)

"Hey, Bob! Can you reset the MySQL server again on the bug-tracking maze set up by Fred over 4 years ago?"

Bob obligingly does so, and then, having been interrupted in the middle of a hard problem, loses his place and can't get back up to speed by the end of day. So while you may gain four hours of butt-in-seat time, you're losing four hours of real productivity on a far more frequent basis.

I'd rather pay Fog Creek to worry about that stuff, and actually ship products.

My first thought is that everyone affected is doing OK. I'm sure that everyone just wants their stuff working too, like electricity. :)

I do hope at a better time, Fogbugz can consider redundancy/failover that Stack Overflow enjoyed.

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