[Foundation-l] Request: WMF commitment as a long term cultural archive?

[George Herbert]

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 10:55 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2 June 2011 18:48, Fae <faenwp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> In 2016 San Francisco has a major earthquake and the servers and
>> operational facilities for the WMF are damaged beyond repair. The
>> emergency hot switchover to Hong Kong is delayed due to an ongoing DoS
>> attack from Eastern European countries. The switchover eventually
>> appears successful and data is synchronized with Hong Kong for the
>> next 3 weeks. At the end of 3 weeks, with a massive raft of escalating
>> complaints about images disappearing, it is realized that this is a
>> result of local data caches expiring. The DoS attack covered the
>> tracks of a passive data worm that only activates during back-up
>> cycles and the loss is irrecoverable due backups aged over 2 weeks
>> being automatically deleted. Due to no archive strategy it is
>> estimated that the majority of digital assets have been permanently
>> lost and estimates for 60% partial reconstruction from remaining cache
>> snapshots and independent global archive sites run to over 2 years of
>> work.
>
>
> This sort of scenario is why some of us have a thing about the backups :-)
>
> (Is there a good image backup of Commons and of the larger wikis, and
> - and this one may be trickier - has anyone ever downloaded said
> backups?)
>
>
> - d.

I've floated this to Erik a couple of times, but if the Foundation
would like an IT disaster response / business continuity audit, I can
do those.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com