On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 11:52 AM, George Herbert
<george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 10:55 AM, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 2 June 2011 18:48, Fae
<faenwp(a)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