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The article reads like they actually have a fault-tolerant system to store their data. This is probably a data dump for whatever files they are working with that might have started out as a cobbled-together prototype that just picked up momentum and pushed beyond its limitations. Many such cases not only in government IT...

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Looking at the article, my read (which could be wrong) is that the backup was in the same room as the original.

No. It says that "most systems" in this data center are backed up to separate hardware on a different floor, and then a backup is made at a physically remote location. This particular G-Drive system was not on the standard backup process - it sounds like it was much higher volume than any others, so maybe they couldn't use it. They did have a pilot going to get G-Drive backed up...it was supposed to be scaled up to the whole thing in December.

Wow, rough timing.

From what I'm seeing that pilot is about NTOPS (National Total Operation Platform System) which they use to manage everything, and since this was on the floor above the fire it made recovery a lot more complicated

There's a high chance i'm missing something though, where did you read about a G-Drive backup system?

G-Drive is the name of their bespoke file storage system that was taken down by the fire.

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