[Wikipedia-l] What if?

Mon Oct 6 20:28:28 UTC 2003

On Mon, 6 Oct 2003 13:02:30 -0700 (PDT), Stevertigo 
<utilitymuffinresearch2 at yahoo.com> gave utterance to the following:

>
> --- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>> The databases are backed up weekly. I keep a copy of
>> it all at home, and
>> so should you.
>>
>> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> Considering that en:wiki is up to {{CHANGESPERHOUR}},
> it may be that a week's loss is too much to bear, and
> would piss a lot of hard working contributors off, if
> by some strange mishap it in fact was lost.

If there are several people who pull a regular database dump (say, weekly) 
then they could coordinate with each other and assign set days/times on 
which they do it. If there are 7 of them we have a "daily" offsite backup. 
So if the data centre burned down on a Thursday morning and Tim, got his 
backup on Wednesday night, we simply restore to new servers from Tim's 
copy and lose less than 24 hours.
PS I hope we are keeping off-site backups of the system configuration each 
time it is changed, too!
-- 
Richard Grevers
Between two evils always pick the one you haven't tried