Allegedly, backups simply couldn’t be kept, due to the G-Drive system’s massive capacity.
X Doubt. Things like S3 can also store massive amounts of data and still support backups or at least geo replication. It’s probably just a matter of cost.
But it gets worse. It turns out that before the fire, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety had apparently instructed government employees to store everything in the G-Drive cloud and not on their office PCs.
Which is totally fine and reasonable? The problem isn’t the order to use the centralized cloud system, but that the system hasn’t been sufficiently secured against possible data loss.
If you can’t afford backups, you can’t afford storage. Anyone competent would factor that in from the early planning stages of a PB-scale storage system.
Going into production without backups? For YEARS? It’s so mind-bogglingly incompetent that I wonder if the whole thing was a long-term conspiracy to destroy evidence or something.
A conspiracy is always possible of course, but people really do tend to put off what isn’t an immediate problem until it’s a disaster.
Fukushima springs to mind. The plant had been warned more than a decade before the disaster that an earthquake in the wrong place would result in catastrophe and didn’t do anything about it, and lo and behold…
I was just thinking that incompetence on this scale is likely deliberate.
Either some manager refused to pay for backups and they’re too highly placed to hold accountable, or they deliberately wanted to lose some data, but I refuse to believe anyone built this system without even considering off-site backups.
X Doubt. Things like S3 can also store massive amounts of data and still support backups or at least geo replication. It’s probably just a matter of cost.
Which is totally fine and reasonable? The problem isn’t the order to use the centralized cloud system, but that the system hasn’t been sufficiently secured against possible data loss.
Tape backup is still a thing.
If you can’t afford backups, you can’t afford storage. Anyone competent would factor that in from the early planning stages of a PB-scale storage system.
Going into production without backups? For YEARS? It’s so mind-bogglingly incompetent that I wonder if the whole thing was a long-term conspiracy to destroy evidence or something.
A conspiracy is always possible of course, but people really do tend to put off what isn’t an immediate problem until it’s a disaster.
Fukushima springs to mind. The plant had been warned more than a decade before the disaster that an earthquake in the wrong place would result in catastrophe and didn’t do anything about it, and lo and behold…
I was just thinking that incompetence on this scale is likely deliberate.
Either some manager refused to pay for backups and they’re too highly placed to hold accountable, or they deliberately wanted to lose some data, but I refuse to believe anyone built this system without even considering off-site backups.
It would be useful to know what percentage of the total storage these 858TB are, because that is practically nothing nowadays.