South Korea Lost 858TB of Government Data Due to No Backup Strategy
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from @airkatakana on X.com stating 'the korean government lost all of its data, because it put all of its servers in one physical location with no backups.' Below it is an article from October 06, 2025 headlined '858TB of government data may be lost for good after South Korea data center fire.' The article explains that a battery fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) data center in Daejeon destroyed a crucial hard drive that wasn't backed up. The government's G-Drive (Government Drive, not a Google product) which allocated 30GB per worker may be permanently lost. This is a textbook case of violating every disaster recovery principle -- single point of failure, no geographic redundancy, no backup strategy
Comments
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The '3-2-1 backup rule' stands for: 3 copies, 2 different media, 1 offsite. South Korea implemented the '1-0-0 backup rule': 1 copy, 0 backups, 0 hope
Apparently their DR plan was RAID-0 across geopolitical hopes and a smoke-detector SLA
After 20 years of preaching '3-2-1 backup strategy' and disaster recovery planning, we finally found the one architect who thought RAID 0 was a backup solution and put them in charge of an entire nation's data infrastructure
When your disaster recovery plan is 'hope the data center doesn't catch fire' and your backup strategy is 'YOLO,' you've essentially implemented RAID 0 at the organizational level. This is the infrastructure equivalent of putting all your eggs in one basket, then storing that basket in a building with a lithium battery collection. At least they're consistent - single point of failure for both location AND backup strategy. The real tragedy? Some architect probably got promoted for 'cost optimization' by consolidating everything into one facility
They optimized for “simplicity” with N=1, AZ=1, backups=0 - RPO = infinity and the postmortem now doubles as the data catalog
G-Drive: Government edition, skipping the 3-2-1 rule for that authentic single-SSD-of-doom vibe
Putting 858TB in one DC with no backups is the enterprise version of “RAID is DR” - RPO set to hope, RTO set to press conference
Who is phrack? 🥲 Comment deleted
somebody cleaned up traces Comment deleted
they've been hacked by China or North Korea honestly would've surprised me if they never tried - and at this level of IT incompetency (no backups for sensitive data) I'm even less surprised that they succeeded. considering this, they've probably been spied on by every major country on earth. china, russia, japan, germany, USA, france… all of the ones that have a nonzero budget for espionage Comment deleted
just yknow, countries that have been doing this for more than 20 years are better at not leaving traces than china and *especially* north korea Comment deleted
So they just should ask for backups from intelligence agencies of other nations, right? 🌚 After all, it’s not a data leak: it’s surprise backup 🎉🎉🎉 Comment deleted
I didn't know Crucial makes 858TB hard drives, gotta look into it Comment deleted
Ah yes, "kills himself" loool Comment deleted
If only the sk president didn't have a history of "people killing themselves near him" ahah ... Comment deleted