Get your shit together and backup your work - Sunday reminder

Dopious

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858 TB of data literally went up in smoke.

125,000 government employees in South Korea use an internally developed service called G-Drive, which provides each employee with 30 GB of space. The service is an important part of the daily work of 74 government agencies and is used, among other things, to store import and export certificates and the results of product safety tests.

In late September, workers at a data center at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS), which operates G-Drive, were moving lithium-ion batteries. For some reason, the batteries exploded and started a fire. The inferno destroyed the entire G-Drive server facility, destroying all 858TB of data — without any backup — The Chosun Daily reports .

An employee at NIRS tells the newspaper that it was “not possible” to back up the cloud storage because it was so large. 95 other systems were also destroyed in the fire, but backups exist for these, although 38 percent of them were only backed up once a month.

The affected authorities have managed to recover some of the content, but experts say many important files are lost. When G-Drive was launched in 2017, South Korea's Ministry of Home Affairs urged the country's authorities to store work files in the cloud instead of locally on employees' computers.

The incident shows how important regular backups and redundancy are. For example, if G-Drive had functioned like Dropbox with a synchronized folder that stores copies both locally and in the cloud, the result would have been much less disastrous.

For ordinary computer users, it's a reminder of the old adage "a copy is no copy," and that you can never trust 100 percent that someone else will protect your files from all threats.

Source: https://www.chosun.com/english/national-en/2025/10/02/FPWGFSXMLNCFPIEGWKZF3BOQ3M/
 
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