This is why our backups need backups. Government officials in South Korea recently learned this lesson the hard way when a data center caught fire. The blaze occurred at the end of September in the National Information Resources Service center in Daejeon. A total of 647 systems were impacted and 96 were destroyed.
Among the casualties was G-Drive, a work cloud system used by 125,000 government officials. There were no backups to this system, allegedly because it had too large a capacity. And not long before the incident, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety had directed employees to store nothing on their work computers and keep everything in the G-Drive system. So when that system literally went up in smoke, so did the only copies of all that information.
A source within one of the affected government departments told The Chosun Daily that “eight years’ worth of work materials have completely disappeared.” It’s a good reminder that even storing things in the cloud requires hardware somewhere along the line, so it’s best to have a separate source just in case something happens.
