Two weeks ago, a fire at the South Korean National Information Resource Service data center caused 647 South Korean government IT services to be disrupted. Initially, it was estimated that services would be fully restored within two weeks. But after two weeks, not all of the lost data could be restored because backups were never made.
The G-Drive cloud storage system used by more than 125,000 South Korean civil servants was destroyed with 858 TB of data lost forever. This is a system developed by Korea itself and not Google Drive. The lost data is equivalent to 8 years of work that is now lost forever. Backups were never made because it was too large. Even more tragically, every civil servant is not allowed to store data on personal computers and is required to use G-Drive.
So far, around 20% of the disrupted services have returned to operation with an estimate of several other services will only recover within a month. According to Korean media, the fire was caused by batteries used by the UPS power backup system in case of a power outage.
