Daniel Barrett wrote:
Wait a minute... I appear to be mistaken.
Old images are indeed saved automatically... in /images/archive. I never noticed this before. Has this been the case for a long time? I don't remember it in Mediawiki 1.9.
DanB
It has been. What has been done more recently is the support for deleted images storage (they were deleted forever) so now they can be undeleted. But it's disabled by default.