[OSM-talk] does one need to download the planet to use osmosis

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

I lost track of who wrote what in this thread, but:
> Although geofabrik says the extracts are done every
> night, the extract I got yesterday was atleast 2 weeks out of date for my
> area. 

We generate all extracts every day, with the sole exception of the North 
America extract which is really only a relic and should be deleted from 
the download server (it is currently done once a week). The NA extract 
doesn't help anybody a lot because it is so big that you might as well 
download the planet.

Back to the original question; if you get yourself an account on the OSM 
dev server then you have NFS access to the planet file and you could run 
Osmosis on it directly. This is not recommended for regular use as it 
creates considerable load on the machine, but if you are in a situation 
where download bandwidth is limited, that's an option. But bear in mind 
that the planet is only updated once each week, so from Friday to 
Wednesday you'll probably get a more current snapshot if you use one of 
the Geofabrik files (except of course the North America one).

Bye
Frederik