Backups

Peace of mind for editors is priceless, and we ourselves know it, having been in the wiki business for years. As a result, Telepedia stores backups of the server and all wikis internally. We maintain full database backups—as opposed to XML backups, which would not contain the full picture—to ensure that in the event of a failure we can restore a wiki from a backup.

This generally only refers to database backups. Images uploaded on Telepedia are stored in S3 and therefore can be considered relatively safe.

We may also, at times, upload backups of our wikis to archive.org, which will allow any user to view and download XML backups of wikis for their own peace of mind; we also allow users to request their own backups of their wikis, although they will need to contact staff for this.

General Schedule

Telepedia keeps a total of 7 backups on hand at any one time to ensure there is sufficient fallback if an issue was to ever arise and we needed to revert back and recover lost data. Furthermore, policy dictates that we back up our sever before every MediaWiki update, and every change that could likely cause breaking issues to the Platform. Our backup schedule is weekly, on a Thursday, meaning that at any one time—assuming that an update hasn't occurred or that we haven't had to discard one backup to make room for another—there should be 7 weeks worth of backups for us to revert to at any time.

This may be considered overkill, but it ensures enough fallback for us to use if an issue ever arises. If there is ever a need that we need to revert to a previous backup, we will let users know with plenty of notice, and exactly the date and time of the backup we will be reverting to. This allows for a certain level of damage control as it means that users are aware of which particular edits/what data will be lost in the revert.