Japan's Hewlett-Packard Company ran into a catastrophe, and the 77TB important data of Kyoto University's supercomputing system was mistakenly deleted

IT House December 29 news, Japan Kyoto University issued a communiqué said that from December 14, 2021 17:32 to December 16, 2021 12:43, due to a defect in the program to back up the supercomputer system (made by Hewlett-Packard corporation in Japan), the supercomputer system had an accident, in which some data stored (/LARGE0) was mistakenly deleted.

Kyoto University said the error caused about 77TB files in the /LARGE0 directory to be deleted by mistake and about 34 million files to be missing.

IT Home learned that in the functional repair of the backup program, hewlett-Packard in Japan mistakenly deleted the files in the /LARGE0 directory when deleting the old log files due to careless modification of the program and the problem of its application.

The backup script contains a log file that was deleted more than 10 days ago by using the find command. With the improvement of scripting functionality, the variable names of the delete process passed to the find command have also changed to improve visibility and readability.

However, the modified script was flawed, and bash released the script by overwriting the script while the shell script was running, reloading the modified shell script from the middle to execute the find command containing undefined variables. Therefore, the file in /LARGE0 was deleted by mistake, not the file saved in the original log directory.

Kyoto University said the backup process has now been stopped and is expected to be restored by the end of January. However, files that disappeared before the backup can no longer be recovered, and features such as incremental backups will be retained in the future, and operational management will be improved to prevent recurrence.

Hewlett-Packard of Japan said it was fully responsible for the incident and promised compensation and the aftermath.