Backing up an internal Wiki without backend access

Lames.

Gawd
Joined
Nov 17, 2007
Messages
736
I work for a pretty big company out the IT Security side of things and the company uses IBM's Connections for their Wiki basis. Our team has a wiki for new hires and general information for the team. One of our team leads is nervous about putting our information in the hands of global IT.

So the scenario is, I need to backup our Wiki in case that Global IT messes up and does not back up our information in case of a server failure. I asked for FTP access or just general access to the hosting server for 5 mins but was denied as it would be to many hoops to jump through because of Corporate and Sys admins that are dicks that do not play well with others.

I have tried doing wget command on a linux box but Connections is based around java/javascript and so it cannot capture anything outside of basic HTML.

I have also tried a few different pieces of software like WinHTTrack and injected a cookie for authentication and even tried their built in Authentication with no luck. It will capture the Corporate Web Security page but after that it does not want to do anything.

I have one of our guys looking at throwing together a Python script to scrape at least the text but it will not carry over format or pictures.

Any other ideas?
 
Say you find a way to scrape all of the information, how would you restore it in the event of failure?

What if you ask IT for a copy of the latest backup?
 
BeautifulSoup with Python should be able to do what you're asking, and can definitely grab the images and formatting.
 
This isn't a technology problem. You need to work with the internal owner of the Wiki and get their SLA on the availability and durability of the wiki service. You should ask them how they'd restore, what the chances of catastrophic failure are, and how you might confirm that they've correctly baked up your part of the wiki. You'll need to build rapport with them, work on earning mutual trust, and go from there.

Really, it's a people problem.
 
This isn't a technology problem. You need to work with the internal owner of the Wiki and get their SLA on the availability and durability of the wiki service. You should ask them how they'd restore, what the chances of catastrophic failure are, and how you might confirm that they've correctly baked up your part of the wiki. You'll need to build rapport with them, work on earning mutual trust, and go from there.

I agree with what the mikeblas has recommended. Even in the worst of the worst of enterprises, there will almost certainly be backups being taken and there should be restore capabilities, even for low priority systems like a wiki. If this is the case, then you don't really have a problem, so you don't really have to waste your time trying to do something impractical to protect your stuff. I have a hunch that even if the people in charge of that infrastructure are completely worthless, they probably already have this stuff well covered and your team lead is simply being overly paranoid.

If the news truly is bad, and the wiki has no backups going on and no recovery plan in place, this might be something you're better off raising up the chain. Directors and similarly sports-coat bearing people of the enterprise do not like to hear of these things and are usually capable of lighting enough fires under the right people to get these things remedied.

Really, it's a people problem.

All problems are people problems.
 
Well, sometimes there are technology problems. But it's not all that common!
 
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