Back in September this year, a South Korean government institution, the National Information Resources Service (NIRS), recently lost 858TB of data after a fire broke out in its datacentre. And while this alone would be painful for a company, the loss was compounded by an act of laziness: no one had thought to back up the data that was stored on the drives.
According to The Chosun, technicians at the NIRS were relocating lithium-ion batteries within the datacentre when, almost an hour in, the batteries exploded inside the room, engulfing all of the G-Drives. G-Drives, by the way, stand for government drives that are used to store data on, instead of Google.
The G-Drives stored data for around 125,000 federal workers, each of whom were allowed 30GB. Worse, the drives were essential to 163 public-facing services, and stored everything from import and export certifications to product safety checks.
As to why these drives were not backed up, one source gave the Chosun a rather unbelievable answer: it couldn’t be backed up due to its large size. To be fair, 95 systems that were destroyed in the fire were backed up, but the amount of data on those servers was nothing compared to the 858TB lost.
While no one was killed by the fire, the incident did have a casualty. One of the recovery specialists working on the NIRS backup site had reportedly jumped out from the 15th floor of a building and died on impact. An investigation of his phone found that he had working around the clock, trying to get regain what was lost to the digital sea.
