emijrp wrote:
I didn't mean security problems. I meant just deleted files by weird terms of service. Commons hosts a lot of images which can be problematic, like nudes or copyrighted materials in some jurisdictions. They can deleted what they want and close every account they want, and we will lost the backups. Period.
Good point.
And we don't only need to keep a copy of every file. We need several copies everywhere, not only in the Amazon coolcloud.
Sure. Relying *just* on Amazon would be very bad.
Wikimedia Foundation has provided image dumps several times in the past, and also rsync3 access to some individuals so that they could clone it.Ah, OK, that is enough (?). Then, you are OK with old-and-broken XML dumps, because people can slurp all the pages using an API scrapper.
If all people that wants it can get it, then it's enough. Not so much in a timely manner, though, but that could be fixed. I'm quite confident that if rediris rang me tomorrow offering 20Tb for hosting commosns image dumps, that could be managed without too much problems.
It's like the enwiki history dump. An image dump is complex, and even less useful.It is not complex, just resources consuming. If they need to buy another 10 TB of space and more CPU, they can. $16M were donated last year. They just need to put resources in relevant stuff. WMF always says "we host the 5th website in the world", I say that they need to act like that.
Less useful? I hope they don't need such a useless dump for recovering images, just like happened in the past.
Yes, that seems sensible. You just need to convince them :) But note that they are already making another datacenter and developing a system with which they would keep a copy of every upload on both of them. They are not so mean.
Community donates images to Commons, community donates money every year, and now community needs to develop a software to extract all the images and packed them, There's no *need* for that. In fact, such script would be trivial from the toolserver.Ah, OK, only people with toolserver account may have access to an image dump. And you say it is trivial from Toolserver and very complex from Wikimedia main servers.
Come on. Making a script to dowload all images is trivial from the toolserver. It's just not so easy using the api. The complexity is for making a dump that *anyone* can download. And it's just resources, not technical.
and of course, host them in a permanent way. Crazy, right? WMF also tries hard to not lose images.I hope that, but we remember a case of lost images.
Yes. That's a reason for making copies, and I support that. But there's a difference between "failures happen" and "WMF is not trying to keep copies".
We want to provide some redundance on our own. That's perfectly fine, but it's not a requirement.That _is_ a requirement. We can't trust Wikimedia Foundation. They lost images. They have problems to generate English Wikipedia dumps and image dumps. They had a hardware failure some months ago in the RAID which hosts the XML dumps, and they didn't offer those dumps during months, while trying to fix the crash.
You just don't understand how dangerous is the current status (and it was worst in the past).
The big problem is its huge size. If it was 2MB everyone and his grandmother would keep a copy.