Sure Tom, here's a SciFi user story:
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.
Cheers, Fae -- http://enwp.org/user_talk:fae Guide to email tags: http://j.mp/faetags
On 2 June 2011 18:27, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
On 2 June 2011 14:21, Fae faenwp@gmail.com wrote:
Briefly responding to a couple of points raised so far:
Yes, there is a need for a policy as otherwise the WMF would have no long term operational archive plan.
Why would we have an archive plan? Archives are for things that aren't expected to needed on a regular basis any more but may need to be referred to in the future. We're not going to archive things on Commons, they'll just stay on Commons indefinitely.
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