Wouldn't a more frequent backup mechanism help third parties who index Wikipedia content, too? I'm thinking about answers.com and others.
Erik, I'd like to say thank you in the name of the Hungarian Wikipedia. We always look forward to the next update and greatly appreciate what you're doing.
Thanks, nyenyec
On 8/31/05, Erik Zachte epzachte@chello.nl wrote:
Finally new wikistats
See http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-August/004043.html for an explanation why they could not be run for so long.
For some projects, like wikipedia, the newest dumps are already 6 weeks old. Please don't ask me for next update, as it is not in my hands.
Data for French and German wikipedias are missing. For French I will have to look into why the job failed. For German the full xml database export is corrupt.
Does this imply that no mediawiki 1.5 full database backup for German is available at all? Or are sql dumps still made as well? If not, a mediawiki 1.4 dump of June 23 is the best we have when worst comes to worst and a restore is needed.
Even when sql dumps are also made, I still have difficulty understanding why database dumps have such low priority. Sure with distributed servers the change for a total collapse diminishes, but never say never. We may survive a power outage more comfortably now (which we did by sheer luck only last time), but other calamities may occur, what about deliberate sabotage, to name an unlikely but devastating scenario?
Total database export takes more than a week, so it must be heavy on the database servers. If a dedicated database server would be needed to produce exports/dumps as often as possible, that would seem a good investment to me. If a site admin would care to comment on this, thanks in advance.
Erik Zachte
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