I want to paste a paragraph by Richard Stallman from his *The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource*[1]. For curious people and for adding more useful ideas to this thread. I want you see this 'movement of backup all!' only a wish of protecting this huge wiki treasure that we are writing since 2001.
*Permit mirror sites.*
When information is available on the web only at one site, its availability is vulnerable. A local problem—a computer crash, an earthquake or flood, a budget cut, a change in policy of the school administration—could cut off access for everyone forever. To guard against loss of the encyclopedia's material, we should make sure that every piece of the encyclopedia is available from many sites on the Internet, and that new copies can be put up if some disappear.
There is no need to set up an organization or a bureaucracy to do this, because Internet users like to set up “mirror sites” which hold duplicate copies of interesting web pages. What we must do in advance is ensure that this is legally permitted.
Therefore, each encyclopedia article and each course should explicitly grant irrevocable permission for anyone to make verbatim copies available on mirror sites. This permission should be one of the basic stated principles of the free encyclopedia.
Some day there may be systematic efforts to ensure that each article and course is replicated in many copies—perhaps at least once on each of the six inhabited continents. This would be a natural extension of the mission of archiving that libraries undertake today. But it would be premature to make formal plans for this now. It is sufficient for now to resolve to make sure people have permission to do this mirroring when they get around to it. Regards, emijrp
[1] http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/free-encyclopedia.html
2010/9/16 John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com
On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 6:16 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Disaster Recovery is not something the Foundation should attempt to crowdsource.
IIRC, it Greg Maxwell who had (some of?) the images that the Foundation lost when a bug was rolled into production.
It is lovely that the Foundation is improving their disaster preparedness, however the community should not depend on the Foundation for this. For all we know, it could be the Foundation which becomes the disaster we never planned for.
I recommend it be left to professionals whose job it is and who have prior experience in the field. If you ...
That you offering to help the community, yea? ;-)
On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 6:17 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
John Vandenberg wrote:
The key would be to allow the mirrors to delete their mirror when they need to use their excess storage capability. If they let us know in advance that they are reclaiming the space, another organisation with excess storage capability can take over.
Surely I don't need to be the one to point out that another huge issue
with
mirrors is that they often replicate bad information ("John Doe is a rapist", etc.). The mirrors you all are talking about sound like they'd update fairly regularly. Some of the current (unofficial) mirrors,
however,
have a horrible tendency to import once and then linger forever.
I'm not so interested in these mirrors putting the data into a database and publishing it onto the web. At present I would be more interested in the dumps (.7z) being systematically mirrored, with a commitment to make them available if the shit ever hit the fan.
-- John Vandenberg
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