Backups Define Digital State Capacity

Updated: 2026.01.09 20D ago 4 sources
South Korea’s NIRS fire appears to have erased the government’s shared G‑Drive—858TB—because it had no backup, reportedly deemed 'too large' to duplicate. When governments centralize working files without offsite/offline redundancy, a single incident can stall ministries. Basic 3‑2‑1 backup and disaster‑recovery standards should be mandatory for public systems. — It reframes state capacity in the digital era as a resilience problem, pressing governments to codify offsite and offline backups as critical‑infrastructure policy.

Sources

Illinois Health Department Exposed Over 700,000 Residents' Personal Data For Years
BeauHD 2026.01.09 78% relevant
The Illinois case—multi‑year exposure via an internal mapping site and uncertainty about whether data were accessed—highlights the same institutional fragility described by the 'backups' idea (South Korea NIRS fire): poor operational IT hygiene and missing governance (access controls, audits, least privilege, backup/DR) turn routine admin sites into systemic failures.
How to tame a complex system
Jason Crawford 2026.01.05 73% relevant
Crawford highlights insulation, redundancy and backups (e.g., levees, sanitation, autoclaves) as the pragmatic way to tame complexity; that aligns with the existing observation that state capacity and basic backup practices are the crucial, often neglected elements of resilience in modern digital/state systems.
Hundreds of Free Software Supporters Tuned in For 'FSF40' Hackathon
EditorDavid 2025.11.29 62% relevant
The article reports a datacenter outage that affected most FSF services and required community and tech‑team recovery; this concretely exemplifies how lack of resilient backups and hosting arrangements can interrupt public‑good digital infrastructure and why backup/resilience is a governance issue.
858TB of Government Data May Be Lost For Good After South Korea Data Center Fire
msmash 2025.10.08 100% relevant
NIRS officials say the G‑Drive was one of 96 systems destroyed and lacked any backup due to its 'large capacity,' leaving some ministries at a standstill.
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