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Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

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Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#102
post #2

> However, due to the system’s large-capacity, low-performance storage structure, no external backups were maintained — meaning all data has been permanently lost. Yikes. You'd think they would at least have one redundant copy of it all. > erasing work files saved individually by some 750,000 civil servants > 30 gigabytes of storage per person That's 22,500 terabytes, about 50 Backblaze storage pods. Or even just mir…

You're assuming average worker utilized the full 30G of storage. More likely average was at like 0.3G.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#103
post #98

The government official who insisted that commercial AWS/GCP/Azure couldn't possibly be trusted with keeping the information will be keeping their head low for a few days then... "The Interior Ministry explained that while most systems at the Daejeon data center are backed up daily to separate equipment within the same center and to a physically remote backup facility, the G-Drive’s structure did not allow for extern…

Rightfully did not trust these companies. Sure what happened is a disaster for them, but you cant simply trust Amazon & Microsoft.

For sure the only error here is zero redundancy.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#105
post #98

The government official who insisted that commercial AWS/GCP/Azure couldn't possibly be trusted with keeping the information will be keeping their head low for a few days then... "The Interior Ministry explained that while most systems at the Daejeon data center are backed up daily to separate equipment within the same center and to a physically remote backup facility, the G-Drive’s structure did not allow for extern…

Rightfully did not trust these companies. Sure what happened is a disaster for them, but you cant simply trust Amazon & Microsoft.

Why not? You can easily encrypt your data before sending it for storage on on S3, for example.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#106

The government official who insisted that commercial AWS/GCP/Azure couldn't possibly be trusted with keeping the information will be keeping their head low for a few days then... "The Interior Ministry explained that while most systems at the Daejeon data center are backed up daily to separate equipment within the same center and to a physically remote backup facility, the G-Drive’s structure did not allow for extern…

Using the cloud would have been the easiest way to achieve the necessary redundancy, but by far not the only one. This is just a flawed concept from the start, with no real redundancy.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#107
post #58

Meanwhile, Estonia has a "data embassy" in Luxembourg: https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-governance/data-embassy/ TL;DR: Estonia operates a Tier 4 (highest security) data center in Luxembourg with diplomatic immunity. Can actively run critical government services in real-time, not just backups.

This comment is in some way more interesting than the topic of the article.

Totally, backup disasters are a regular occurence (maybe not to the degree of negligence) but the Estonia DR is wild.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#108

The government official who insisted that commercial AWS/GCP/Azure couldn't possibly be trusted with keeping the information will be keeping their head low for a few days then... "The Interior Ministry explained that while most systems at the Daejeon data center are backed up daily to separate equipment within the same center and to a physically remote backup facility, the G-Drive’s structure did not allow for extern…

Because these companies never lose data, like during some lightning strikes, oh wait: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33989384

As a government you should not be putting your stuff in an environment under control of some other nation, period. That is a completely different issue and does not really relate to making backups.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#109
post #52

Funny, because the same thing happened in Nepal a few weeks ago. Protestors/rioters burned some government buildings, along with the tech infrastructure within them, so now almost all electronic data is gone.

Would this have been any different if these documents were stored non-electronically though? I understand that the whole point of electronic data is that it can be backed up, but if the alternative were simply an analog system then it would have fared no better.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#110
post #98

The government official who insisted that commercial AWS/GCP/Azure couldn't possibly be trusted with keeping the information will be keeping their head low for a few days then... "The Interior Ministry explained that while most systems at the Daejeon data center are backed up daily to separate equipment within the same center and to a physically remote backup facility, the G-Drive’s structure did not allow for extern…

Rightfully did not trust these companies. Sure what happened is a disaster for them, but you cant simply trust Amazon & Microsoft.

On the Microsoft side CVE-2025–55241 is still pretty recent.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45282497

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