Jimmy Wales wrote:
With images, though, there has grown this bizarre culture that we must not delete anything until we have a consensus to do so. This is partly because images can't be easily restored, and there is some legitimacy to that as a factor in how we do things, but I think it has gotten much worse. Wildly inappropriate images which do not even have a majority support for keeping are kept in articles in a way that similarly inappropriate text would be shot on sight.
I think this is in fact a (if not the) major cause of this controversy. I'm not at all surprised that many users are very nervous about image deletion: we still remember when CSD I4 was added in September and as a consequence people had to go to Answers.com and other mirrors to look for copies of hastily deleted images. I don't know if any free images were actually permanently lost because of that, but it wouldn't surprise me at all either.
I've occasionally thought of setting up a bot to download and archive every file that is uploaded to Wikipedia. I think just the knowledge that permanent copies existed _somewhere_ would probably calm people down a lot, even if the copies wouldn't be easily accessible. I don't think the bandwidth and storage costs would be prohibitive. I'd have to get someone's help to set up offsite backups, though.