On Sep 16, 2010, at 4:16 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 12:58 AM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
John Vandenberg, 16/09/2010 03:00:
English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portugeuse, Swedish and Chinese Wikipedia all appear to have some mirrors, but are any of them reliable enough to be used for disaster recovery?
Obviously not, at least Italian ones.
The smaller projects are easier to backup, as they are smaller. I am sure that with a little effort and coordination, chapters, universities and similar organisations would be willing to routinely backup a subset of projects, and combined we would have multiple current backups of all projects.
I agree. Now we have only this: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/main/news/21606/
Kudos to Milos & Wikimedia Serbia!!
How many TB are needed? I don't know what's the average, but e.g. right now my university should have about 50 TB of free disk space (which is not so much, after all).
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.
I appreciate all the enthusiasm in thread, but (speaking for myself as an individual, and IT consultant who does things like business continuity and disaster recovery planning consulting among other infrastructure work) this is a core operational competency role that the Foundation needs to ensure is handled in house as part of the routine IT operations. And, as I understand it now, it is, though I have only had high level discussions with some of the Foundation staff about this and not seen the server configs myself so I can't personally attest to the status.
Database and file backups need to be in (at least) 2 locations, and my understanding is that there are complete redundant copies at the Amsterdam datacenter now, and that the new main datacenter in Virginia will continue this.
If a third location is needed, the current HQ in San Francisco is plenty far enough away from the other 2 locations to provide excellent DR capability. If there's need for a datacenter / fast net access redundant copy in SF or the Bay Area, a rack or few U of a shared rack would be enough for a fileserver, and that's available at multiple excellently connected locations in the Bay Area
Having multiple backups (w/ private user, deleted content data tables) within WMF at various data centers is no doubt extremely crucial & depending on third parties would be a terrible mistake.
But also up-to-date distributed copies (sans private data, but w/ full history & images) outside WMF is also very important. Why can't we do both? I highly highly doubt anything bad will happen to WMF but despite best intentions & efforts, you never know (zombies take over? rogue sys admin?). Distributed backups beyond WMF help ensure wikipedia goes on w/o reliance on WMF
Disaster Recovery is not something the Foundation should attempt to crowdsource. I recommend it be left to professionals whose job it is and who have prior experience in the field. If you haven't watched major services drop, datacenters burn down, software environments melt down, and spent years working to ensure that those don't happen again, you really don't have a good feel for the type and magnitude of the risks and the sorts of tools to employ to try and mitigate them.
Surely there are third parties with such experience and interested in this. Internet Archives? Bibliotecha (sp?) Alexandria? Library of Congress? Surely google has or should have copy?, what about as a public dataset on Amazon cloud services (thought there was something?), universities are also good some with super data centers (e.g. San Diego State University), etc.
If there's interest in an offline discussion on IT disasters and disaster recovery and reliability engineering, I can do that, but it should be offline from Foundation-L...
Maybe not foundation-l :) but I am cool with some degree of transparency & open discussion on a list or some communications channel dedicated to the topic.
I'm not involved in creating dumps but couldn't it be possible to offer daily or weekly diffs of enwiki and other wikis, and have utilities to apply diffs to the last full dump? Having regular dumps + regular diffs (weekly, daily, and even minutely) + Swiss army knife utilities for handling diffs and dumps is something that openstreetmap has managed to excel with and makes me very happy :) to know people have up-to-date copies distributed on various places. I feel sad to know this is not the case with wikipedia :(
@aude
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
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