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

Post by seunosewa » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 8:12 PM UTC

dottjt wrote: post #109

aio2 wrote: 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.

Post by nebula8804 » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 8:12 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #81

MangoCoffee wrote: post #76

It's hard to believe this happened. South Korea has tech giants like Samsung, and yet this is how the government runs? Is the US government any better?

The US government still relies heavily on physical records.

Post by firesteelrain » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 8:13 PM UTC

miken123 wrote: post #108

kristianc wrote: post #95

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.

Post by redwood » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 8:14 PM UTC

Post by rvba » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 8:14 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…