If you think having a backup is too expensive, try not having one.

[nsaspook]

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/...-for-good-after-south-korea-data-center-fire/

858TB of government data may be lost for good after South Korea data center fire
Destroyed drive wasn't backed up, officials say

Meanwhile, a government worker overseeing efforts to restore the data center has died after jumping from a building.
As reported by local media outlet The Dong-A Ilbo, the 56-year-old man was found in cardiac arrest near the central building at the government complex in Sejong City at 10.50am on Friday, October 3. He was taken to hospital, and died shortly afterwards.
The man was a senior officer in the Digital Government Innovation Office and had been overseeing work on the data center network. His mobile phone was found in the smoking area on the 15th floor of the government building.

https://www.chosun.com/english/national-en/2025/10/02/FPWGFSXMLNCFPIEGWKZF3BOQ3M/

The Ministry of Personnel Management, where all affiliated officials use the G-Drive, is particularly affected. A source from the Ministry of Personnel Management said, “It’s daunting as eight years’ worth of work materials have completely disappeared.”
...
It provided 30GB, gigabytes, per public official. At the time, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety also issued guidelines to each ministry stating, “All work materials should not be stored on office PCs but should be stored on the G-Drive.”

G drive as in GONE drive.

 

[FactChecker]

Long ago, before backup utilities were so widely available, I worked in a computer lab that did backups to tape every night. The disk capacities were not big then. The administrators used a program that they wrote, which looped to copy every file to tape and finally rewind the tape for them to dismount. Every night, they started many backups for many computers and later dismounted all the tapes. They did that for a long time.
One day, an administrator noticed the tapes seemed to rewind many times in a single run. They saw that the program had the rewind inside the loop after every file. So only the last file remained on the backup tape and all others had been overwritten every night.

The moral of the story is to check that archived files can actually be retrieved.