Input requested: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2017-January/087393.html , https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T99483
Personally I think that the main issue is the slowness of some of the tools people use (including dumps.wikimedia.org itself), so I tried to improve the docs a bit with what I learnt: * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps/Download_tools#Downloading_the_XM... * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps#Faster_archives_and_servers
Nemo
P.s.: In the last few weeks I archived 20+ TiB of Wikimedia Commons files on Internet Archive and I'm continuing, see http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Commons .