All the testnets in reality are short lived (maybe a week or so) as we move to Alpha II which will be longer lived. The new client API’s right now are looming so I would expect that we move rather quickly, but I always think that 
I would imagine a testnet will go away in a few days, but recently the community keep them going with varying results. We have a couple of parts disabled like bootstrap cache that would allow folks to share a file simply that uses existing nodes on the network to seed of off.
So long winded and I am sorry, but bottom line testnets are probably considered short lived. Alpha/Beta will be much longer lived though.
We really need to get to secured data republish though to save everyone continually uploading again, we know it’s a pita, but we have to prioritise other things right now. More interviews this week though so hopefully more resources will help us, the recent hires have all proven very valuable, although a lot of the work is not yet visible to the community.