David A. Desrosiers wrote:
Is there a better way to retrieve them without slamming the servers or putting more pressure on brion and friends to tar them up? A torrent file perhaps?
I've got several terabytes of storage and plenty of bandwidth to host them on our public trackers, if such a thing were to even exist.
There were some torrents for enwiki and possibly also for the images, set by a third party. See the archives.