By Matt Underwood 858TB of government data may be lost for good after South Korea data center fire. This is a monumental loss, and frankly, a bit mind-boggling. It’s the kind of story that makes you shake your head and wonder how this could happen in this day and age. We’re talking about almost a petabyte of data potentially gone forever due to a data center fire.
The initial report states that the G-Drive couldn’t have a backup system because of its large capacity. That’s the excuse, and it’s simply not good enough. The capacity isn’t an issue. You can absolutely back up that much data. It’s almost as if they’re claiming it’s too big to back up when you can purchase small portable SSDs with a huge amount of storage. It’s gross negligence, plain and simple. To make matters worse, a government worker overseeing the data restoration efforts died after jumping from a building. It’s a tragic situation all around.
The solutions have been around for ages, and it is a solved problem. We’re in the era of readily available backups. Distributed architecture is key; it’s not just about speed, but about building redundancy. Availability zones, independent regions—these are standard practices to guard against the inevitable: server failures, bad code, or even something as devastating as a fire. They should have replicated it to an entirely different account dedicated to backups. This is standard procedure for a reason.
One of the best practices is to replicate to an entirely different account dedicated to backups that only a limited number of people have access to. Limiting the blast radius in case of any type of attack, especially ransomware. If a company loses data due to ransomware, it’s almost always because they cheaped out on backups.
This wasn’t a massive amount of data. You can get incredible capacity on relatively affordable 4U Plex servers, and single tape cartridges of similar size exist. It is a failure of basic data management. You have to have backups; learn it, know it, live it. Many commenters even joked that it’s a basic rule of IT. Some of the data had backups, but the backups were also lost in the fire.
There’s also the potential for the cloud not being an option, due to concerns about data sovereignty with American companies. It can’t be denied that there may be legitimate reasons for a state to want to keep its data within its own borders.
The loss of data is compounded by the loss of a government employee’s life, which makes the situation more disturbing. What happened is a true tragedy.
Going back to the data, if they weren’t using off-site backups, that’s a huge red flag. If your data doesn’t exist in three separate locations, it doesn’t exist.
It makes you wonder whether the data had any protection in place. There’s no other way. They are essentially claiming that they couldn’t afford backups. It seems like there’s been a massive irretrievable data loss, which could potentially lose research material for the future.
It makes you consider the question of whether this was an accident, or something more deliberate. Many of the comments point to a lack of backups and lack of forethought. Some commenters said this is the perfect example of how not to run things.
Then you consider that the data was likely from government employees, meaning a lot of work product. This kind of situation is not new and doesn’t surprise me. If the data isn’t properly stored, you can expect that employee productivity evaporated once their files were gone.
The common advice is to follow the 3-2-1 rule. Three copies of your data, on two different media, with one copy stored offsite. Also, this is the capital of solid-state memory!
This whole situation appears to be nothing short of gross negligence. Not having a backup system is a failure. They needed to put in place readily accessible online backups. In today’s world, this is not difficult. They needed multiple offline sets to protect against internal sabotage. Anyone who doesn’t follow these guidelines is setting themselves up for failure. A petabyte of data isn’t even considered a lot of data. IT teams have already started working on exabytes of data backup sets. What has happened is insane, considering South Korea is a technology powerhouse, and is also the CAPITAL OF SOLID STATE MEMORY!