South Korean government learns the importance of backups the hard way after catastrophic fire — 858 terabytes of data goes up in magic smoke

It's a fairly safe bet that on any given day, at least a good dozen IT departments are trying to convince their bosses and/or users about the vital importance of backups. Unfortunately, it seems that the argument was lost in the South Korean government, as the institution has completely lost the sizable amount of 858 terabytes of data, with 0 bytes of backups.

The event happened on September 26 and was caused by a battery fire at the National Information Resources Service datacenter in Daejeon, burning up 384 battery packs, the majority of one floor, and taking down 96 government systems. While 95 of those had backups, the G-Drive system (no relation to Google Drive), used primarily but not only by the Ministry of Personnel Management, did not.

In total, it's estimated that roughly 17% of central government officials are affected, and roughly eight years' worth of data was lost. The fire promptly brought down government email, online post office, websites, complaints and petition services, and even the national 119 emergency service. A full recovery should take about a month, as reportedly the affected teams are having trouble even figuring out which specific data was lost. As of October 4, it was estimated that only 17.8% of services were back online.

While a datacenter fire is an event that can happen anywhere at any time, it's more than a little puzzling to find that the G-Drive data was lost because, according to an unnamed source, "[it] couldn't have a backup due to its large capacity."

858 terabytes is a big number for a household, but barely registers in the scale of datacenter storage, where entire petabytes are doled out like candy. This fact is even stranger, as South Korea is seen as a highly technologically advanced country, being the home of Samsung and other conglomerates known as chaebol.

G-Drive is a document sharing platform, similar to Google Drive. Each employee's default quota on the system was 30 GB, and users were instructed to keep their data there instead of in the office computers, as should be the policy everywhere... when there are backups. There's also a certain irony in the fact that the more vintage systems were then ones whose data survived.

While the fire itself apparently caused no casualties, one government worker overseeing the data recovery sadly took his own life by jumping off the Central Building in Sejong's Government Complex on October 3. Four people have been arrested in connection with the fire, reportedly under suspicion of criminal negligence.

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