Your Tax Dollars At Work - South Korean Edition

This wasn't one department, or one small business too cheap to spend money on Information Technology, this was the South Korean government. NIRS fire destroys government's cloud storage system, no backups available

The fire broke out in the server room on the fifth floor of the center, damaging 96 information systems designated as critical to central government operations, including the G-Drive platform. The G-Drive has been in use since 2018, requiring government officials to store all work documents in the cloud instead of on personal computers. It provided around 30 gigabytes of storage per person.

That's all good. But one of the reasons you store data in the cloud is because your IT department, or your cloud provider, can provide BACKUPS. That seems to have slipped everyone's mind.

However, due to the system’s large-capacity, low-performance storage structure, no external backups were maintained — meaning all data has been permanently lost.

Yeah. Someone should lose their job, but this is a government bureaucracy, and if the Korean version of that is anything like the US version anyone fired will not be the people who made this bone-headed decision.

Criticism continues to build regarding the government's data management protocols.

Gee, ya think?

For all important data, at least one copy should be off-site. And you can use the cloud (I do) but I encrypt most things I send up there, because you have no expectation of privacy. And not everything I have is important. I would be sad if I lost all of my memes, but my life would go on. My tax data, on the other hand... It would be problematic if I lost that.

Yes computers do burn up in fires. Raid is fine, but you need offsite copies of anything important.

This isn't a new idea. Data centers were doing this long before I joined the ranks of Information Technology workers. And I'm older than dirt.

Hat tip to Pixy Misa and Daily News Stuff 6 October 2025: Never Say Never Again Edition

Nobody has ever made an adage of putting all your eggs in one basket, right?