"Turn On Hidden Files and Change to .hwp"... Public Officials Share 'G Drive Recovery' Manual [Government in]

Fire at National Information Resources Service Paralyzes Systems
Official Documents Handwritten and Sent by Fax
"Administration Returns to the 1990s," Officials Lament
"Two Days Off for Central Disaster Headquarters Dispatch," Notice Issued

Notice of Partial Suspension of Services Posted at the Community Center Yonhap News

The prolonged paralysis of government computer systems due to the fire at the National Information Resources Service is causing increasingly severe disruptions in the work of public officials. With it now impossible to send or approve official documents, each ministry has been forced to rely on outdated methods such as fax and telephone to continue operations on a temporary basis. The complete destruction of the 'G Drive,' which serves as a storage for ministry work documents, has even resulted in the loss of materials for legislative notices, forcing officials to rewrite enforcement rules from scratch.

According to government sources, as the computer systems were paralyzed last week, various 'survival tactics' for continuing work have started to emerge among public officials. In fact, some have shared a so-called 'G Drive File Recovery Manual,' which involves searching for documents left in temporary folders on personal PCs. The method consists of enabling hidden files in Windows Explorer, copying files from the cache folder, and changing the file extension to '.hwp' or '.xlsx' to open them. One official lamented, "There were thousands of files just on my computer," adding, "It is an enormous amount of repetitive manual work, but there was no other choice."

Various inconveniences are occurring on the ground. An official from one ministry said, "Internal documents can still be circulated, but it is impossible to send or receive official documents with other agencies. As a result, we are getting handwritten approvals and sending documents manually." Another official reported, "I prepared an official document and obtained signatures from the drafter, reviewer, and final approver, but when I tried to send it by fax, I found myself in the awkward situation of not even knowing the recipient's fax number." Yet another public official said, "The internal portal has been completely wiped out, and there is talk that we may need to prepare for several months before recovery is possible."

With the computer network halted in this way, ongoing legislative procedures have also been suspended. An official from one ministry explained, "All the materials for the legislative notice have disappeared. We now have to redo the work on the enforcement rules from the beginning." It has been pointed out that this is not just a simple administrative inconvenience, but an unavoidable disruption even to the government's policy implementation schedule.

Among public officials, the current situation is being described as a "historical records crisis." This is an unprecedented event that goes beyond a simple computer network failure, shaking the very foundation of government administration, including official document processing, legislative procedures, and internal collaboration systems.

In response, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety is strengthening its countermeasures by recruiting staff from each ministry to be dispatched to the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters. It has also announced that dispatched staff will be granted two days of substitute leave. However, with the timing of the computer network's restoration still uncertain, the confusion is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.