Government Mobilizes Budget and Personnel to Accelerate Recovery
Internal Cloud "G-Drive" for Officials Deemed Irrecoverable
With Chuseok approaching, the government is accelerating recovery efforts related to the fire at the National Information Resources Service by deploying additional personnel. However, it has determined that the internal cloud storage "G-Drive," used by government officials and directly damaged by the fire, is difficult to recover because no backup was made.
On October 2, Yoon Hojoong, head of the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters (and Minister of the Interior and Safety), held a meeting at the Government Complex Seoul and stated, "We are acutely aware that the current pace of recovery does not meet public expectations," adding, "To accelerate the recovery, we have mobilized all available personnel and budget, and have taken measures to deploy private sector experts and research institute staff to the site." Specialists from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) are supporting the recovery efforts, with four ETRI staff members immediately dispatched to the site.
The government also plans to speed up the removal of dust from the fifth-floor data center where the fire occurred. The maximum number of specialized server cleaning companies nationwide will be mobilized, and equipment disassembly, dust removal, and testing will be carried out in parallel. As a result, the dust removal process, initially expected to take two weeks, will be halved, with completion targeted by October 5.
Although it has been seven days since the fire at the National Information Resources Service, recovery work remains slow. As of 6 a.m. on October 2, only 110 out of 647 systems affected by the outage had been restored, resulting in a recovery rate of 17%. Some of the unrecovered systems have no alternative solutions, so public inconvenience continues.
In particular, the internal cloud storage "G-Drive" used by government officials has been deemed virtually unrecoverable. It is one of 96 systems directly damaged in the 7-1 data center. An official from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety explained, "G-Drive is a 'large-capacity, low-performance storage,' and unlike other systems, it was not backed up," adding, "We have determined that it is completely lost and cannot be restored."
The number of actual G-Drive users reaches 125,000. The lost data amounts to approximately 858TB (terabytes), equivalent to 22.308 trillion pages of A4-sized government work documents, all of which have disappeared. Although usage varies by ministry, the Ministry of Personnel Management reportedly stored all work information on G-Drive rather than on PCs, resulting in significant losses. Lim Jeonggyu, Director of Public Service at the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, stated, "Documents related to approval and reporting are basically also stored in the Onnara System, so we believe that all final government reports and similar materials are preserved."
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