2011/6/28 Platonides
<platonides@gmail.com>
emijrp wrote:
Hi;
@Derrick: I don't trust Amazon.
I didn't mean security problems. I meant just deleted files by weird terms of service. Commons hosts a lot of images which can be problematic, like nudes or copyrighted materials in some jurisdictions. They can deleted what they want and close every account they want, and we will lost the backups. Period.
And we don't only need to keep a copy of every file. We need several copies everywhere, not only in the Amazon coolcloud.
I'd like having the hashes for the xml dumps content instead of the compressed one, though, so it could be easily stored with better compression without weakening the integrity check.
Really, I don't trust Wikimedia
Foundation either. They can't and/or they don't want to provide image
dumps (what is worst?).
Wikimedia Foundation has provided image dumps several times in the past, and also rsync3 access to some individuals so that they could clone it.
Ah, OK, that is enough (?). Then, you are OK with old-and-broken XML dumps, because people can slurp all the pages using an API scrapper.
It's like the enwiki history dump. An image dump is complex, and even less useful.
It is not complex, just resources consuming. If they need to buy another 10 TB of space and more CPU, they can. $16M were donated last year. They just need to put resources in relevant stuff. WMF always says "we host the 5th website in the world", I say that they need to act like that.
Less useful? I hope they don't need such a useless dump for recovering images, just like happened in the past.
Community donates images to Commons, community
donates money every year, and now community needs to develop a software
to extract all the images and packed them,
There's no *need* for that. In fact, such script would be trivial from the toolserver.
Ah, OK, only people with toolserver account may have access to an image dump. And you say it is trivial from Toolserver and very complex from Wikimedia main servers.
and of course, host them in a permanent way. Crazy, right?
WMF also tries hard to not lose images.
I hope that, but we remember a case of lost images.
We want to provide some redundance on our own. That's perfectly fine, but it's not a requirement.
That _is_ a requirement. We can't trust Wikimedia Foundation. They lost images. They have problems to generate English Wikipedia dumps and image dumps. They had a hardware failure some months ago in the RAID which hosts the XML dumps, and they didn't offer those dumps during months, while trying to fix the crash.
Consider that WMF could be automatically deleting page history older than a month,
or images not used on any article. *That* would be a real problem.
You just don't understand how dangerous is the current status (and it was worst in the past).
@Milos: Instead of spliting image dump using the first letter of
filenames, I thought about spliting using the upload date (YYYY-MM-DD).
So, first chunks (2005-01-01) will be tiny, and recent ones of several
GB (a single day).
Regards,
emijrp
I like that idea since it means the dumps are static. They could be placed in tape inside a safe and not needed to be taken out unless data loss arises.