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By Chae Yun-hwan
SEOUL, Oct. 1 (Yonhap) -- The government's official document storage system has been destroyed in last week's fire at the state data management agency, wiping out work documents of the nation's 750,000 civil servants, the interior ministry said Wednesday.
The cloud-based repository, known as G Drive, was among the 96 systems that burned down in Friday's fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) in Daejeon, about 140 kilometers south of Seoul, according to the ministry.
As the system is not backed up externally, all documents stored on the repository have been lost. Government employees have been advised to save all work-related documents on G Drive since 2018, rather than on their computers.
Government branches that have exclusively used the system to store work documents are expected to experience significant disruptions to operations.
Meanwhile, 101 out of 647 services affected by Friday's fire at the NIRS were brought back online, putting the restoration rate at 15.6 percent.
The restored services included 21 out of 36 "Grade 1" services, or those considered essential based on their impact and number of users.
Meanwhile, a situation room, led by Vice Interior Minister Kim Min-jae, to monitor the progress in restoration efforts has been installed at the NIRS.
Kim told a briefing that a cloud company has been selected for the relocation of the 96 systems burned down by the fire to a data center in the southeastern city of Daegu.
Of the 546 systems that have yet to be restored, the government has set up replacement services for 267 of them.
The fire is estimated to have caused 12.6 billion won (US$8.9 million) in losses for small merchants who sold items on the postal service's online shopping mall, which was affected by the fire.
Earlier in the day, police booked four people on suspicion of occupational negligence over the fire, which began after a lithium-ion battery explosion when workers were relocating batteries stored in a server room on the fifth floor of the NIRS.