George Herbert wrote:
On 4/18/07, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Robert Leverington wrote:
We could set up a page on meta to catalog who is
keeping copies of
what (seperate it by database) so we can know how safe each database
is and users can volunteer to regularly download a copy of the one
they choose. If say five or ten people (from different countries) had
a copy of each (preferably long term users) we would probably be safe
even as a result of a continent wide genocide.
Not just long-term users; they would need some tech savvy as well. I
would qualify as a long term user, but wouldn't have a clue about how to
deal with the stuff if unfortunate circumstances did arise.
If Wikipedia has to be rebuilt from such distributed backups, we
goofed - There should be warm-standby content copies in geographical
distributed regions and a real offsite backups (tape, or lugged disk)
rotation mechanism in place.
I agree, but it's always a good idea to have fail-safe plans on multiple
levels.
There's nothing wrong with giving key project
members (or anyone else
who wants it) the whole dataset to take home, but as noted above, most
people would have a hard time re-launching the site given a hard disk
and a request to do so.
If we truly do have a civilization-ending event, restoring Wikipedia
to full live production status is probably not the number one
priority.
If it's really civilization ending there won't be anybody around to use
it anyway. The only solution at that point may be to have a version
launched on a vessel into deep space. :-) What will those aliens
think of us when they read the Pokémon articles?
A more credible scenario is that power goes out in St
Petersburg for
long enough to be a problem, and the datacenter can't get enough
diesel to keep going forever (or the upstream net connectivity fails).
This is the type of scenario for which major organizations keep a
geographically diverse systems set going.
And things still go wrong! ... Like yesterday's Blackberry blackout.
Ec