All individual work materials stored on the central government's cloud-based drive system were destroyed in a recent fire at a national data infrastructure center in Daejeon.

The interior ministry said Wednesday that the "G Drive" used by 750-thousand employees of the South Korean government was among 96 class one and two data systems that were lost in the blaze that broke out in the data processing room on the fifth floor of the National Information Resources Service(NIRS) on Friday.

In 2018, the ministry instructed government officials to save all their work data in G Drive, a high-capacity, low-tier storage system with no external backup.

However, official documents, including those for authorization and briefings, are saved in the "Onnara" work system used by government workers in addition to "G Drive", which means those files are likely to be restored once the Onnara system is back up and running.

In a press release, the ministry clarified that most government systems managed by the NIRS are backed up to other devices at the same facility, as well as an additional off-site recovery center. 

However, the ministry said that G Drive's nature as a bulk-focused low-speed storage system made external backups difficult.

said the data systems at the NIRS are backed up daily in a separate device at the center, while further backup is carried out at a separate center away from the NIRS.