On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
Can someone articulate what the use case is?
Is there someone out there who could use a 5 TB image archive but is disappointed it doesn't exist? Seems rather implausible.
If not, then I assume that everyone is really after only some subset of the files. If that's the case we should try to figure out what kinds of subsets and the best way to handle them.
Er. I've maintained a non-WMF disaster recovery archive for a long time, though its no longer completely current since the rsync went away and web fetching is lossy.
It saved our rear a number of times, saving thousands of images from irreparable loss. Moreover it allowed things like image hashing before we had that in the database, and it would allow perceptual lossy hash matching if I ever got around to implementing tools to access the output.
There really are use cases. Moreover, making complete copies of the public data available as dumps to the public is a WMF board supported initiative.