Japanese university loses 77TB of data after backup problem

The University of Kyoto in Japan has lost 34 million files of data in a problem that occurred with an HPE supercomputer storage backup program.

In total, between December 14 and December 16, 77 terabytes of data deleted by accident. It is not known what kind of data is involved. The University of Kyoto has notified departments of data disappearance via email. The university discovered the problem on December 16 and still thought it at 100TB could go. This week that has been corrected to 77TB.

It concerns data that was stored on the Large0 storage cluster of an HPE supercomputer. The university has multiple Cray systems from HPE. A change to the backup program caused files to be deleted. Much of it could not be recovered.

The university hopes to be able to continue the backup at the end of January, after taking measures to prevent the problem from recurring. The research facility will continue to work with backup mirrors and keep previous generations of backups intact. In addition, the university asks employees to make backups of important files themselves.

Source: Kyoto University, Computing Services