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

[David Gerard]

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.