Kevin,
I only ask these questions as food for thought. I don't expect a reply. One systems VP to another..
Can you explain why they are doing full copy of files after applying whatever patches they did? Why do this and keep everyone offline? couldn't they wait til like 2AM? Or just do the most critical files first? How can you do an effective job in QA in a real time environment like this?
If they ran out of space and needed to do a re-org then I understand. Or if there was significant file corruption and they needed to do a full repair. In either case the DBA and the QA folks need to get it together and be more proactive in managing the freespace and index sizes. Do the proper QA upfront and eliminate the problems.
FYI, whenever they told me 30 minutes to recover and get everyone back up, I get very skeptical. To me that means about 3 hours. So my suggestion is to ask ask ask what needs to get done in 30 minutes and is it realistic? Otherwise I would not put my name on a public post saying 30 minutes. I would at least pad the time some. If it comes in early hey, great.
As for going off and doing something else while waiting for the site to come back up. Good suggestion and that's what most of us did. BUT we have items that we want posted tonight. We need to get these items out there so whatever else we are doing isn't that important. I want to get my posts out there. Plus the work that we have been doing writing ads for the past 3 days and scheduling the campaign to launch tonight is in jepordy. So it's alot more impact that just 30 minutes or even 3 hours.
Feel free to delete this post at your convenience.