[Foundation-l] Wikimedia mirrors

[John Vandenberg]

(subject was: Cyn Skyberg joins Wikimedia as CTCO!)
On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 4:03 AM, Bod Notbod <bodnotbod at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 12:06 PM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I've always
>> thought that if for some reason all of the Wikimedia projects suddenly
>> disappeared (and no one had any backups) we would be upset about it for a
>> couple of days but then we would just start again ...
>
> O RLY!?

This was my first thought as well.  But as Liam said after that...

>> ... and we would do it better!

If this scenario ever did happen, I expect that the first step would
be to ensure it never happened again.

We, the people, should start planning for this worse case scenario now.

A mirror system would be great; that is how project gutenberg, linux
and sf.net do disaster recovery.  It is simple, cheap and effective.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/wiki/Mirrors
http://www.gutenberg.org/MIRRORS.ALL

English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portugeuse, Swedish and
Chinese Wikipedia all appear to have some mirrors, but are any of them
reliable enough to be used for disaster recovery?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MIRROR
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Weiternutzung
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Sites_miroirs
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cloni

It would be nice to have an agreement with these mirrors that they
will make the most recent dump available if WMF is unable to provide
it.

I don't see any mirrors listed on the Spanish page about mirrors.

Are there mirrors of other Wikimedia projects?

The smaller projects are easier to backup, as they are smaller.  I am
sure that with a little effort and coordination, chapters,
universities and similar organisations would be willing to routinely
backup a subset of projects, and combined we would have multiple
current backups of all projects.

--
John Vandenberg

Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff
on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)
- Torvalds, Linus (1996-07-20).