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

But the problem is they sacrificed "Availability" in pursuit of security and privacy. Losing your data to natural and man-made disasters is one of the biggest risks facing any storage infrastructure. Any system that cannot protect your data against those should never be deployed.

"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 external backups."

This is not a surprise to them. They had knowingly accepted the risk of infrastructure being destroyed by natural and man-made disasters. I mean, WTF!

> ... a countries' government entire data?

But the bulk of the data is "boring": important to individuals, but not state security ("sorry Jiyeong, the computer doesn't know if you are a government employee. Apologies if you have rent to make this month!")

There likely exists data where the risk calculation ends up differently, so that you wouldn't store it in this system. For example, for nuke launch codes, they might rather lose than loose them. Better to risk having to reset and re-arm them than to have them hijacked

> Is encryption, [in?] any form, really reliable protection

There's always residual risk. E.g.: can you guarantee that every set of guards that you have watching national datacenters is immune from being bribed?

Copying data around on your own territory thus also carries risks, but you cannot get around it if you want backups for (parts of) the data

People in this thread are discussing specific cryptographic primitives that they think are trustworthy, which I think goes a bit deeper than makes sense here. Readily evident is that there are ciphers trusted by different governments around the world for their communication and storage, and that you can layer them such that all need to be broken before arriving at the plain, original data. There is also evidence in the Snowden archives that (iirc) e.g. PGP could not be broken by the NSA at the time. Several ciphers held up for the last 25+ years and are not expected to be broken by quantum computers either. All of these sources can be drawn upon to arrive at a solid choice for an encryption scheme

WTF are you talking about? There are absolutely zero backdoors of any kind known to be in any standard open source encryption systems, and symmetric cryptography 256-bits or more is not subject to cracking by anyone or anything, not even if general purpose quantum computers are doable and prove scalable. Shor's algorithm applies to public-key not symmetric, where the best that can be done is Grover's quantum search for a square-root speed up. You seem to be crossing a number of streams here in your information.