A catastrophic battery fire at South Korea's national data centre has permanently destroyed 858 terabytes of critical government data—roughly eight years' worth of documents—because officials decided the system was "too large" to back up.
The incident, which occurred on September 26 at the National Information Resources Service facility in Daejeon, has left thousands of government workers unable to access essential files and exposed a stunning gap in data protection practices.
The Unthinkable Happened: No Backup for 858TB
The fire destroyed 96 government systems, but only one lacked backups: G-Drive (Government Drive, unrelated to Google's service), a document-sharing platform used primarily by the Ministry of Personnel Management. Each of South Korea's approximately 17% of central government officials had been allocated 30GB of storage space on the system, making it their primary repository for work documents.
"The G-Drive couldn't have a backup system due to its large capacity," an unnamed official explained to The Chosun, a justification that has stunned IT professionals worldwide. In modern data centre terms, 858TB is relatively modest—entire petabytes (1,000 terabytes) are routinely backed up in enterprise environments.
"Employees stored all work materials on the G-Drive and used them as needed, but operations are now practically at a standstill," a Ministry of Personnel Management source revealed.
A Lithium Battery Sparked Digital Chaos
The blaze began around 8:20 PM local time when lithium-ion batteries ignited, eventually consuming 384 battery packs and destroying the majority of one floor. Some 73 firefighters and 70 fire vehicles were deployed to combat the flames. The fire took down critical services, including government email, online postal services, complaint and petition platforms, and even the national 119 emergency service line.
Thirteen days after the fire, only 25.5 per cent of the government's online services had been restored, with full recovery expected to take approximately one month. Four people have been arrested as police investigate whether professional negligence contributed to the fire.
The disaster's human cost extends beyond lost data. A 56-year-old senior officer in the Digital Government Innovation Office, who had been overseeing the data centre restoration efforts, died after jumping from a government building in Sejong City on October 3.
What This Means for Data Security
This incident serves as a stark reminder that technological advancement doesn't guarantee proper data management.
South Korea, home to Samsung and other tech giants, ironically saw its older, backed-up systems survive while the modern G-Drive platform failed catastrophically. For businesses and organisations of any size, the lesson is clear: no system is too large to back up, and the cost of redundancy pales in comparison to permanent data loss.