Data Disaster to Data Resilience: Lessons from CEDA’s Data Recovery

On 18 November 2025, a small error during internal data migration of between storage systems of the JASMIN data analysis platform in the UK led to a substantial part of the CEDA Archive being made temporarily unavailable online (but not lost!). The unfortunate incident caused serious disruption to a large community of users (and additional workload and stress for the team), it provided important learning points for the team in terms of:  

• enhancing data security,  

• importance of mutual support among professional colleagues,  

• the value of clear and transparent communications with your users 

• a unique opportunity to showcase the capabilities of a cutting-edge digital research infrastructure in the recovery and return to service with this “unscheduled disaster recovery exercise”. 

 

We report on the circumstances leading to the incident, the lessons learned, and the technical capabilities employed in the recovery. One example shows, nearly 800 Terabytes of data transferred from a partner institution in the USA in just over 27 hours, at a rate of over 8 Gigabytes per second using Globus. The ability to orchestrate such a transfer is the result of many years of international collaboration to support large-scale environmental science, and highlights the benefits of a federated, replicated data infrastructure built on well-engineered technologies.