On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 11:26 PM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Depends on the machine's securelevel.
Google informs me that securelevel is a BSD feature. Wikimedia uses Linux and Solaris. It might make sense to have backups be sent to a server that no one has remote access to, say, but the point is that there's always a possibility of some kind of catastrophic failure. Maybe the servers will all catch on fire and melt, maybe someone will get past datacenter security and steal them, who knows. Remember the story of the company that carefully kept off-site backups -- on a different floor of the World Trade Center, where its servers were located.
It doesn't hurt to have extra copies out there, and it certainly fits with Wikimedia's mission. Any researcher who wants to analyze the whole data set should be able to without having to ask anyone's permission -- that's what free information is about.