Comment by vayup
9 days ago
A lot of folks are arguing that the real problem is that they refused to use US cloud providers. No, that's not the issue. It's a perfectly reasonable choice to build your own storage infrastructure if it is needed.
But the problem is they sacrificed "Availability" in pursuit of security and privacy. Losing your data to natural and man-made disasters is one of the biggest risks facing any storage infrastructure. Any system that cannot protect your data against those should never be deployed.
"The Interior Ministry explained that while most systems at the Daejeon data center are backed up daily to separate equipment within the same center and to a physically remote backup facility, the G-Drive’s structure did not allow for external backups."
This is not a surprise to them. They had knowingly accepted the risk of infrastructure being destroyed by natural and man-made disasters. I mean, WTF!
Yeah, it's such a lame excuse to say "did not allow for external backups", as if that's a reasonable choice that they just couldn't work around.
South Korea isn't some poor backwater, they have tech companies and expertise, that they were "unable" to do backups was an intentional choice.
Durability is more precise than availability in this context because it is about the data surviving (not avoiding downtime).