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

I understand data sovereignty in the case where a foreign entity might cut off access to your data, but this paranoia that storing info under your bed is the safest bet is straight up false. We have post-quantum encryption widely available already. If your fear is that a foreign entity will access your data, you're technologically illiterate.

Obviously no person in a lawmaking position will ever have the patience or foresight to learn about this, but the fact they won't even try is all the more infuriating.

Wow. Maybe backups would have been a good idea.

I see some comments about North Korean hacking, so I feel I need to clear up some misconceptions.

First, (as you guys have seen) South Korea's IT security track record is not great. Many high-profile commercial sites have been hacked. If a government site was hacked by North Korea, it won't be the first, and while it would be another source of political bickering and finger-pointing, it's likely to blow over in a month.

In fact, given that SK's president Lee started his term in June after his predecessor Yoon's disastrous attempt at overthrowing the constitution, Lee could easily frame this as a proof of the Yoon admin's incompetence.

But deliberately setting fire on a government data center? Now that's a career ending move. If that's found out, someone's going to prison for the rest of their life. Someone should be really desperate to attempt that kind of thing. But what thing could be so horrible that they would rather risk everything to burn the evidence? Merely "we got hacked by North Korea" doesn't cut it.

Which brings us to the method. A bunch of old lithium batteries, overdue for replacement, and predictably the job was sold to the lowest bidder - and the police knows the identity of everyone involved in the job and is questioning them as we speak.

So if you are the evil perpetrator, either you bribed one of the lowest wage workers to start a fire (and the guy is being questioned right now), or you just hoped one of the age-old batteries would randomly start fire. Neither sounds like a good plan.

Which brings us to the question "Why do people consider that plausible?" And that's a doozy.

Did I mention that President Yoon almost started a coup and got kicked out? Among the countless stupid things he did, he somehow got hooked up on election conspiracy theories that say that South Korea's election commission was infiltrated by Chinese spies (along with major political parties, newspapers, courts, schools, and everything) and they cooked the numbers to make the (then incumbent) People's Power Party to lose congressional election of 2024.

Of course, the theory breaks down the moment you look close. If Chinese spies had that much power, how come they let Yoon win his own election in 2022? Never mind that South Korea uses paper ballots and every ballot and every voting place is counted under the watch of representatives from multiple parties. To change numbers in one counting place, you'll have to bribe at least a dozen people. Good luck doing that at a national scale.

But somehow that doesn't deter those devoted conspiracy theorists, and now there are millions of idiots in South Korea who shout "Yoon Again" and believe our lord savior Trump will come to Korea any day soon, smite Chinese spy Lee and communist Democratic Party from their seats, and restore Yoon at his rightful place at the presidential office.

(Really, South Korea was fortunate that Yoon had the charisma of a wet sack of potatoes. If he were half as good as Trump, who knows what would have happened ...)

So, if you listen to the news from South Korea, and somehow there's a lot of noise about Chinese masterminds controlling everything in South Korea ... well now you know what's going on.

The operational expenses of this stuff dwarfs the hardware cost. For the tape mountain, you need robots to confirm the tapes still work (mean time to detection of device failure and recovery are key for RAID durability computations). So, someone needs to constantly repair the robots or whatever.

If I was being paid to manage that data set, I’d probably find two enterprise storage vendors, and stick two copies of the data set on them, each with primary secondary backup. Enterprise flash has been under a dollar a gigabyte for over a decade, so that’s under $1.7M per copy, amortized over five years. That’s $700K per year, and one of the four copies (at 3-4 sites) could be the primary store.

(I can’t be bothered to look up current prices, but moore’s law says there have been six capacity doublings since then, and it still applies to flash and networking, so divide my estimate by 2^6 — so, ten-ish grand per year, with zero full time babysitters required).