[Foundation-l] what do we do in the event the Foundation fails? - Re: Policy governance ends

[Ray Saintonge]

George Herbert wrote:

>On 4/18/07, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>  
>
>>Robert Leverington wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>We could set up a page on meta to catalog who is keeping copies of
>>>what (seperate it by database) so we can know how safe each database
>>>is and users can volunteer to regularly download a copy of the one
>>>they choose. If say five or ten people (from different countries) had
>>>a copy of each (preferably long term users) we would probably be safe
>>>even as a result of a continent wide genocide.
>>>      
>>>
>>Not just long-term users; they would need some tech savvy as well.  I
>>would qualify as a long term user, but wouldn't have a clue about how to
>>deal with the stuff if unfortunate circumstances did arise.
>>    
>>
>If Wikipedia has to be rebuilt from such distributed backups, we
>goofed - There should be warm-standby content copies in geographical
>distributed regions and a real offsite backups (tape, or lugged disk)
>rotation mechanism in place.
>
I agree, but it's always a good idea to have fail-safe plans on multiple 
levels.

>There's nothing wrong with giving key project members (or anyone else
>who wants it) the whole dataset to take home, but as noted above, most
>people would have a hard time re-launching the site given a hard disk
>and a request to do so.
>
>If we truly do have a civilization-ending event, restoring Wikipedia
>to full live production status is probably not the number one
>priority.
>
If it's really civilization ending there won't be anybody around to use 
it anyway.  The only solution at that point may be to have a version 
launched on a vessel into deep space.  :-)   What will those aliens 
think of us when they read the Pokémon articles?

>A more credible scenario is that power goes out in St Petersburg for
>long enough to be a problem, and the datacenter can't get enough
>diesel to keep going forever (or the upstream net connectivity fails).
> This is the type of scenario for which major organizations keep a
>geographically diverse systems set going.
>
And things still go wrong!  ... Like yesterday's Blackberry blackout.

Ec