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

Post by mastax » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 8:22 PM UTC

yongjik wrote: post #13

benoau wrote: 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…

It's even worse. According to other articles [1], the total data of "G drive" was 858 TB. It's almost farcical to calculate, but AWS S3 has pricing of about $0.023/GB/month, which means the South Korean government could have reliable multi-storage backup of the whole data at about $20k/month. Or about $900/month if they opted for "Glacier deep archive" tier ($0.00099/GB/month). They did have backup of the data ... in…

Post by lima » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 8:23 PM UTC

whatevaa wrote: post #121

miken123 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I heard that consumer clouds are only locally redundant and there aren't even backups. So big DC damage could result in data loss.

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 8:23 PM UTC

username332211 wrote: post #123

sneak wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you expect government IT in a hierarchical respect-your-superiors-even-when-wrong society to be competent?

South Korea isn't some sort of backwards nation and I'm sure it's chaebols share the same culture. Having had unfortunate encounters with government IT in other countries I can bet that the root cause wasn't the national culture. It was the internal culture of "I want to do the same exact same thing I've always done until the day I retire." Absent outside pressure, civil services across the word tend advance scientif…

Post by Theodores » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 8:25 PM UTC

Post by MiddleEndian » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 8:25 PM UTC

m3047 wrote: post #42

Mindblowing. Took a walk. All I can say is that if business continues "as usual" and the economy and public services continue largely unaffected then either there were local copies of critical documents, or you can fire a lot of those workers; either one of those ways the "stress test" was a success.