Thread:Project:Support desk/How long will the Change history kept in database?/reply (3)

4names, I perceived 195.80 question as a worry about losing page history and the response was directed to that concern.

Of course, there are maintenance scripts for deleting pages from the entire database, but the default behavior of MediaWiki is to keep all data. Also, page deletion is backed up since it's stored in the database, and backups should be done on the entire database. The XML dumps doesn't count as a "complete" backup, hence you can't rely on them to restore all the contents.