Facepalm: Plenty of people are guilty of not backing up their data, but one would expect a government facility to have numerous copies of its information. The National Information Resources Service (NIRS) in South Korea, however, recently lost 858TB of government data after a fire broke out in the building – and there were no backups.
On September 26, technicians were relocating lithium-ion batteries in the NIRS data center. Forty minutes later, the batteries exploded, causing a blazing inferno
The fire raged for hours. Thankfully, nobody was killed in the blaze, but it did destroy the server racks where G-Drive was stored.
G-Drive, which stands for Government drive rather than Google, stored data from around 125,000 federal workers – who were allowed 30GB each – and was core to 163 public-facing services, holding everything from import and export certifications to product safety checks, according to reports.
What's stunned South Korea is the revelation that the G-Drive was not backed up. An official told The Chosun that the drive could not be backed up due to its large size. About 858TB of data was lost. Ninety-five other systems in the fire were also destroyed, but they were backed up.
According to the National Information Resources Service, of the 647 systems at the Daejeon headquarters, 62% were backed up daily, but the remaining 38% were backed up once a month. Some systems were last backed up on August 31.
The incident affected government services, including tax filings and workers' emails. Restoring the services has been slower than expected, with less than 20% back online a week after the fire. Several government services are expected to be offline for up to a month.
While some of the G-Drive data has been recovered via partial backups and manual recreations, experts say a "valuable portion" of the data is gone forever.
While nobody died in the fire, there is a tragic element to the story. A 56-year-old recovery specialist, who was working at the NIRS backup site in nearby Sejong, reportedly jumped from a 15th-story window. His phone showed he had been working around the clock during the efforts, suggesting the unrelenting pressure and public scrutiny had become too much. South Korea's leadership expressed its condolences and called for improved working conditions for those dealing with the fire's aftermath.