On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 11:52 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 10:55 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 2 June 2011 18:48, Fae faenwp@gmail.com wrote:
In 2016 San Francisco has a major earthquake and the servers and operational facilities for the WMF are damaged beyond repair. The emergency hot switchover to Hong Kong is delayed due to an ongoing DoS attack from Eastern European countries. The switchover eventually appears successful and data is synchronized with Hong Kong for the next 3 weeks. At the end of 3 weeks, with a massive raft of escalating complaints about images disappearing, it is realized that this is a result of local data caches expiring. The DoS attack covered the tracks of a passive data worm that only activates during back-up cycles and the loss is irrecoverable due backups aged over 2 weeks being automatically deleted. Due to no archive strategy it is estimated that the majority of digital assets have been permanently lost and estimates for 60% partial reconstruction from remaining cache snapshots and independent global archive sites run to over 2 years of work.
This sort of scenario is why some of us have a thing about the backups :-)
(Is there a good image backup of Commons and of the larger wikis, and
- and this one may be trickier - has anyone ever downloaded said
backups?)
- d.
I've floated this to Erik a couple of times, but if the Foundation would like an IT disaster response / business continuity audit, I can do those.
Right, when Fae asked her question I was thinking of the more philosophical type of planning for storage that archives often do ("as a matter of course we retain documents for 10 years, or in perpetuity, or whatever"); but disaster and backup planning are also relevant. That's documented as a part of technical operations rather than as board-level policies; I think we're all on the same page about caring about this issue though. It is also relevant that the WMF is a financially stable non-profit, and thus unlikely to go out of business through the vagaries of the market.
-- phoebe