Welcome to the South Korean Ministry of Digital Amnesia
South Korea just managed to lose 858 terabytes of government data in a fire.Source: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/239988/zuid-korea-verliest-overheidsdata-door-brand-en-ontbreken-van-back-up.html
Not in a remote village with barely any internet.
Not in a developing nation hidden somewhere on the map.
No — in South Korea.
Yes, you read that correctly. South Korea.
Not North Korea…
SOUTH Korea.
Land of gigabit internet, Samsung SSDs, KIA cars, and AI-powered toilet seats.
The cause?
Turns out ‘the cloud’ was just one very flammable room
No backup.
Let me say that again.
NO BACKUP.
Let that sink in.
Yes I actually wrote that..
– N O – F R I C K I N G – B A C K U P –
The government’s internal “G-Drive” — not Google, but their own cloud — went up in smoke, literally…..
And why? Because, according to a government source, its capacity was deemed too large to back up.
191,000 civil servants lost their data. That’s 191,000 people who spent years producing work that now only exists on the event horizon of a black hole.
Someone probably saved a few euros on storage budgets. Let’s be generous and call it €50,000 per year in “cost savings.”
Cheap, right?
Except that same decision just flushed billions in lost work hours down the drain.
The math nobody did
Here’s MURPHY!
191,000 employees x €50,000 (yes probably too low) per year = €9.55 billion in salaries.
Assume just 10% of their work is unrecoverable → roughly €1 billion lost. And it’s probably more — not even counting the wasted time digging through old local copies that turn out to be outdated versions.
A full redundant backup system? Let’s say €30,000. Forty-eight 20-TB drives, an enclosure, and another rack in another building.
Or, if you’re feeling fancy, a full LTO-9 tape library: €50,000.
Or even more fancy! Do it both! Because the data *might* just be important.
Congratulations — you saved the price of a company car and lost an economy.
How?
Assumptions are the mother of all fuckups, and boy this was a fuckup++
Because someone, somewhere, thought:
- “The data center already has fire suppression, right?”
- Because off-site replication is expensive.
- Because we’ll implement that next fiscal year.
Because nobody wants to be the person who approves a line item that doesn’t sparkle on a PowerPoint slide.
And oh… sparks did fly in that burning data centre.
Ohh, the irony
Maybe the NSA still has a copy — they usually do.
South Korea literally manufactures NAND flash memory.
They build the chips and drives that Western companies use to actually store backups on!
And yet their own government couldn’t be bothered to keep a copy of its own bytes.
You honestly can’t make this shit up.
Moral of the story
Hope is not a backup strategy
Don’t be like South Korea.. Create backups ( yes plural! )
And if your “cloud” only exists in one building — it’s not a cloud it is an accident waiting to happen.
Last words
Murphy’s law in full effect
What I don’t get is that there was nobody in that office who asked themselves:
“What would it cost if Murphy comes along?”
Because we all know Murphy.
If it can happen — it will happen.
And here’s the part I really don’t understand:
Years ago, I worked at a client. One day, we actually saw a ransomware attack unfold in real time — files changing, folders being encrypted, everything.
Of course, that attack should never have happened in the first place.
That was a lesson learned.
But what followed was exactly how you handle a crisis:
one phone call later, the right team pulled the shared drive offline. Within hours, everything was back to normal. Data restored. Cause identified. Mitigations in place.
Business as usual.
Because that’s what proper incident response looks like. You see the fire, you pull the plug, you restore from backup.
Not “we’ll back up later.”
Not “too big to copy.”
That’s the difference between losing a few hours and losing a country’s memory.
Brain out.