Erik Zachte wrote:

The last database dump was made 18 days ago. Brion does this normally once a week and he is on another assignement till tomorrow.

Does this mean that Wikipeia loses 18 days of edits if a diskcrash occurs, or are there other backups as well?

I sure hope not... But it does look that way (I have those cur dumps on my hard disk just in case now).

If SQl dumps are all we have, would it not be better to schedule an automatic dump each night? Or does this bring Wikipedia to a halt for a prolonged time?

Brion may have since devised a better way to do this, but I remember him having to put each wiki in read only mode for at least several minutes each to do the weekly backups (the larger the wiki the longer it took).

I'm sure this could be done automatically if you could trust a script to have the type of access controls needed to make a wiki read only.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)