On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Can someone articulate what the use case is?
Is there someone out there who could use a 5 TB image archive but is
disappointed it doesn't exist? Seems rather implausible.
If not, then I assume that everyone is really after only some subset
of the files. If that's the case we should try to figure out what
kinds of subsets and the best way to handle them.
Er. I've maintained a non-WMF disaster recovery archive for a long
time, though its no longer completely current since the rsync went
away and web fetching is lossy.
It saved our rear a number of times, saving thousands of images from
irreparable loss. Moreover it allowed things like image hashing before
we had that in the database, and it would allow perceptual lossy hash
matching if I ever got around to implementing tools to access the
output.
There really are use cases. Moreover, making complete copies of the
public data available as dumps to the public is a WMF board supported
initiative.