University Loses Valuable Supercomputer Research

[Demon_Skeith]

Kyoto University, a top research institute in Japan, recently lost a whole bunch of research after its supercomputer system accidentally wiped out a whopping 77 terabytes of data during what was supposed to be a routine backup procedure.

That malfunction, which occurred sometime between Dec. 14 and Dec. 16, erased approximately 34 million files belonging to 14 different research groups that had been using the school’s supercomputing system. The university operates Hewlett Packard Cray computing systems and a DataDirect ExaScaler storage system—the likes of which can be utilized by research teams for various purposes.

It’s unclear what kind of files were specifically deleted or what caused the actual malfunction, though the school has said that the work of at least four different groups will not be able to be restored.

Source

 

[Sincerem]

Is there no backup for the files? It is needful to have back up files for those kinds of essential database, in case of any unheralded circumstances like the one that recently occured.

 

[froggyboy604]

It is unfortunate that the data backup staff members did not also backup their data on many Blu-Ray-R burnable disc which are read-only after burning the disc, so backup data can't be accidentally erased because of a software or human error once data is burned to discs.

 

[Demon_Skeith]

Is there no backup for the files? It is needful to have back up files for those kinds of essential database, in case of any unheralded circumstances like the one that recently occured.

this was the data backups

 

[Grungie]

It is unfortunate that the data backup staff members did not also backup their data on many Blu-Ray-R burnable disc which are read-only after burning the disc, so backup data can't be accidentally erased because of a software or human error once data is burned to discs.

Blu-ray R’s are basically useless in a backup environment. It’s standard practice to use LTO tapes for backups at a large scale. They’re better and cheaper than Blu-rays.

 

[Artisan Vistra]

Hope they don't lose funding over this or at least make sure this doesn't happen again.

 

[Sincerem]

this was the data backups

It's a pity that the backup got lost. So, where is the original of the documents?

 

[Artisan Vistra]

It's a pity that the backup got lost. So, where is the original of the documents?

Sounds like confidential info. My guess is they will try this again anyways like nothing really happened?

 

[Demon_Skeith]

It's a pity that the backup got lost. So, where is the original of the documents?

Had that thought after, hopefully its not all just stored on the thing that just failed.