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

[Thomas Dalton]

On 2 June 2011 18:48, Fae <faenwp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sure Tom, here's a SciFi user story:
>
> 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.

Ah, you don't mean "archive". You mean "backup". They are very
different things and serve very different purposes. The backing up of
images is an issue. The text exists in loads of places, but there is a
risk of losing the images. I know it has been discussed numerous times
being, so hopefully the WMF is working on it (or may have recently put
something in place that I'm not aware of).