Backup MediaWiki site hosted by 3rd party?

Question

We use MediaWiki hosted by ibiblio. We are not admins on the server, so we have limited access to the server (we are wiki sysops and Bureaucrats (or maybe Bureaucrats and Administrators)). I'm a little risk averse, so I'd like to backup the content in case something catastrophic happens.

The content we have uploaded includes "pages" (the stuff we create), and supporting files like PNGs and ZIPs (linked in the pages). The linked files were uploaded to the wiki; and they do not reside on an external site.

I'm looking for software so I can perform an external backup of the site. More defined requirements are:

• Backup site with credentials
  • Discover site content (like crawling)
  • Download wiki mark'd-down pages
  • Download linked files (like PNGs and ZIPs)
  • Download descriptions (like those of PNGs and ZIPs)
• Restore site with credentials
  • Create mark'd-down pages pages
  • Upload content of mark'd-down pages
  • Upload linked files (like PNGs and ZIPs)
  • Restore descriptions (like those of PNGs and ZIPs)

The software does not need to backup and restore the revision histories of the pages or linked files. Since the page content and linked files are valuable, that's all I am really concerned about.

The software does not need to backup and restore the user database. Since the page content and linked files are valuable, that's all I am really concerned about.

I would like a list of users and their level. But there's no need to perform the restore on them because we found so many users are transient over the years. That is, I'm willing to recreate power users, like Bureaucrats and Administrators, by hand if needed.

Finally, the backup can be un-encrypted. This is all public information, and there's no need to encrypt a backup.

Does such software exist? If so, what is it?

Answer 1

Backup should be the responsibility of the site operator, so I'd say you are doing it wrong. That said, you can easily write your own backup script using the allpages API. E.g. a script using pywikibot would look something like this (not tested):

import urllib2
import pywikibot
from pywikibot import pagegenerators

site = pywikibot.Site()
for ns in site.namespaces():
    gen = pagegenerators.AllpagesPageGenerator(namespace=ns, site=site)
    for page in pagegenerators.PreloadingGenerator(gen, 100):
        with open('/tmp/wiki-backup/%s.wikitext' % page.title(), 'w') as f:
            f.write(page.text())
        if isinstance(page, pywikibot.FilePage):
            urllib.urlretrieve(page.fileUrl(), '/tmp/wiki-backup/%s' ! page.title())