[Foundation-l] Massive image loss

John at Darkstar vacuum at jeb.no
Fri Sep 5 10:21:36 UTC 2008


Shit happens! I'm sure there are some backups floating around.
John

Tim Starling skrev:
> This is a triple-crosspost. I suggest you reply to wikitech-l only.
> 
> A mistake I made caused the loss of 496 full-resolution images from
> Wikimedia servers.
> 
> I have recovered as many images as I can, drawing on the following sources:
> 
> * Squid cache (pmtpa, knams and yaseo)
> * May 8 backup of some wikis on storage1
> * Duplicates with the same signature, found on the same or other wikis
> 
> That brought the number lost down from about 3000 to the current 496. For
> the remaining files, I made a copy of their thumbnail directories:
> 
> http://upload.wikimedia.org/lost-image-thumb-backup/
> 
> A list of missing images can be found here:
> 
> http://noc.wikimedia.org/~tstarling/missing-images-2008-09
> 
> If anyone has any ideas about where to find more backup files, I'd be
> willing to hear them. Otherwise, the community will just have to reupload
> as many as possible.
> 
> The technical details were as follows: I fixed a bug in File.php, and
> without checking what other changes were made to it, deployed the most
> recent version of the file on the Wikimedia servers, without also updating
> the rest of MediaWiki. Because FileRepo::$thumbDir was unset,
> LocalFile::migrateThumbFile() had the effect of deleting the source image
> for any thumbnail request which reached the backend. I reverted the change
> after about 20 minutes, following a report on IRC.
> 
> My sincere apologies.
> 
> -- Tim Starling
> 
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