Wow. this is one of the biggest instances of IT incompetence that I’ve heard of in recent years. Hosting a server farm without remote backups? Sound like the London Magnetic Tape Incident.
The LMTI: One employee was sent to the other end of London with the magnetic backup tapes every day. He got money to take a taxi, but saved it and took the tube. His favourite seat was right above one of the motors, where he sat the bag with the tapes on the floor for the journey. The tapes were just stored at the destination, and not checked in any way. Guess what they learned the first time they had to rely on those tapes?
Perhaps contained evidence against the former PM who tried to do a military coup and this is the way of getting rid of it? Perhaps protecting co-conspirators if not the top guy.
Always backup!!! From the fire, I mean, place your safety first
At least they saved the Internet box. Otherwise, we’ll have to bother the elders of the Internet again.
The fire reached Big Ben?
At a sea world??!!
Hmm a system that stored government documents caught fire and they have no backups? Hmm, this carries the same energy of registry offices catching fire “spontaneously” in the past.
Too slow storage to back up? What a stupid, false reason. I assume nobody works at night. Do something else than full backups and you at least have something. A simple differential update replication would have saved them here.
Or do it by priority. Files that change often or are very important are copied fully often, maybe daily. A differential update of all files could follow daily or who knows weekly. Its the government, they should have money to add more storage, so that shouldn’t be the problem. At least some strategy to manage slow speed, instead not having ANY backup its the dumbest thing I’ve read from governments in a while.
As a sysadmin that’s pretty much my worst nightmare. I really feel for those trying to pick the pieces back up again after that.
I feel your pain, but meanwhile I’m laughing. No backups, no fire suppression system, what the fuck are these clowns doing.
Suppressing evidence? Looks like this was a deliberate oversight to later erase data.
Probably data retention safety was overruled earlier by one person.
So, I think the designed erase worked as designed .
Pretty big conspiracy theory for a situation where incompetence doesn’t seem out of the ordinary.
SysAdmins saying “We need X, we need Y”, someone who signs the cheques saying “But it works fine! Why would there be a fire? We already spent so much on those UPSs”
I don’t know a lot at this time. The cool thing is this will be discussed for years , and any who follow this will know a lot more.
I’m just saying if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck it may not be a squirrel
What you described isn’t “looks like a duck, quacks like a duck”.
This is a fire in a government (publicly-funded) location in an industry that’s often overlooked and underfunded… in a traditionally conservative country (with a Liberal leader for the last few months) that is part of a very top-down hierarchical structure. Which would suggest that the complaints of a systems administrator are likely to be ignored. And that’s assuming that the systems administrator is competent, which isn’t a guarantee in and of itself.
I’m seeing what looks like a duck, I’m hearing the quacks. The conspiracy theory is that it’s a squirrel in a duck costume that learned how to quack so people would toss it bread.
Here we have a glass of water, it’s half full.
Did someone forget to fill it up, or did someone drink it.
Is it institutional incompetence or criminal conspiracy?
I don’t think changing the analogy makes your argument stronger
Bingo!
I don’t know about deliberate, but it certainly crossed my mind.
Korean government’s
South.
(Just in case anybody else isn’t a clairvoyant either)
I’ll be honest, I assumed it was the South because I would be honestly shocked if the North ever reported anything bad happening to itself.
The north doesn’t need backups because errors do not happen there /s
There are no backup failures in Ba Sing Se
“Cloud storage” in the North is just a drawer full of usb sticks confiscated from people smuggling K-dramas in from the South.
Always have two backups in different places than the original. If not, the least you can do is have one backup copy. How does the government don’t have such thing?
Government people get jobs by schmoozing and making deals, not by merit or skill.
Pournelle’s Law always seems relevant.
Ooh, ooh! I’m in that law! I’m in the (to paraphrase) “competent and devoted to the goal but unempowered” group!
This is a clear example where ‘the cloud’ really is a physical place.
It’s too bad it wasn’t a rain cloud or it would have destroyed the fire and not the other way around
So this is the “maintenance” the gov services are currently having.
Kein Backup, kein Mitleid!
