A data center fire in South Korea sees 858 TB of government files and 'eight years’ worth of work' stored in the cloud go up in smoke

A massive industrial plant surrounded by towering machinery and pipelines, with flames shooting skyward from a flare stack, casting an intense glow against the sky.

With so much of our personal and professional lives stored in the cloud, it's easy to forget just how fragile these systems can be. Don't misunderstand, I enjoy the convenience of my important files being accessible from almost anywhere—but I back up the really important stuff at least twice on physical media nowhere near the cloud. A recent data centre disaster reminded me exactly why these backups are so important.

G-Drive (no, not that one) is a work cloud system used by 125,000 government officials in South Korea. According to The Chosun Daily, this cloud is hosted within the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) in Daejeon. When the data centre caught fire at the end of last month, apparently 858 TB of important data was lost as no backups were kept (via Techspot).