General Assessment Questions (Thanks!)

Alright, so we just had a crash and burn of a server luckily it was only a few days after opening. Everyone on my server is now pretty shaken up and doesn't want to take chances with another world they've put a hundred hours into going belly up. I'm not an experienced server admin so some general question answering would be amazing.

1) What is the likely hood that starting up a craftbukkit server tomorrow will make it to official release and beyond? Are people trusting craftbukkit enough to start servers that they intend to have indefinitely? So, are there actually servers out there with hundreds of hours of work on them and people are confident enough that they will not just disappear or break?

2) If something goes belly up, is it possible to divorce a server from craftbukkit and run it vanilla while still keeping the world and work put into it? Would it then be possible to mitigate to another server mod or back to craftbukkit at a future date?

Thanks!

 

1) Norways largest minecraft server is fully migrated to Bukkit with thousands of hours of work going into it. Regular backups means that if the worst should happen, worst case scenario is 6 hours of lost work in case of world corruption.

2) There is nothing to prevent you from using your world with vanilla or another mod. Bukkit does nothing to modify the world files unless you install plugins that modify your world directly. And even then, that won't break compatibility with non bukkit servers.