The Kyoto University in Japan has lost about 77TB of research data due to an error in the backup system of its Hewlett-Packard supercomputer.

The incident occurred between December 14 and 16, 2021, and resulted in 34 million files from 14 research groups being wiped from the system and the backup file. //

At the moment, the backup process has been stopped. To prevent data loss from happening again, the university has scraped the backup system and plans to apply improvements and re-introduce it in January 2022.

The plan is to also keep incremental backups - which cover files that have been changed since the last backup happened - in addition to full backup mirrors.