Gregory Maxwell wrote:
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.
And the box run out of disk space. We could try until it fills again, though.
A sysadmin fixing images with wrong hashes would also be nice https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17057#c3
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.
IMHO the problem is not accessing it, but hashing those terabytes of images.
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.