It is one of my favorite books. Because it is based on a true story, because it covers different eras, because it is about a mythical book and because of how the entire plot is woven together. In The Guardians of the Book (RBA), Geraldine Brooks tells the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a manuscript that traverses centuries of war, persecution and displacement. In the novel, a Catholic priest manages to save him from the flames during the Inquisition; Centuries later, a Muslim risks his life to hide it from the Nazis and, in 1992, the book is safe again during the Bosnian war. The novel is inspired by the true story of a manuscript that survived because, at different times, there were people who understood that protecting it meant protecting something much larger than an object.
In Kherson, Ukraine, something happened that seems to belong to that same tradition of memory keepers. Only that the object that had to be saved no longer fit in a person’s hands. There were more than 20 terabytes of information or the equivalent of more than 5 million books. And they were trapped in a city about to come under Russian occupation. On February 24, 2022, when the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Kherson National Technical University had its own data center on the second floor of the main building. Not only scientific archives were stored there. There were also mobilization records and personnel files. If the Russian army managed to control those servers, the information could become a tool capable of putting hundreds of families at risk. The problem was that the servers couldn’t be discreetly moved out of the building. And time was running out.
On March 1, Russian forces took control of Kherson. The university had to find another way to evacuate what it could not physically transport: its memory. In the first days of the occupation, the employee responsible for the archives managed to enter the building and destroyed the paper files. The fire eliminated the physical documents, but left the digital copy that was stored on the servers intact. And that copy, which until then had been a safeguard, had now become the building’s greatest danger. The only way out was to make it disappear, but not by destroying it: by removing it from Kherson.
The university’s IT team contacted URAN, the Ukrainian research and education network, which in turn turned to Microsoft. The solution was to urgently move the data to the cloud. Under normal conditions, a migration of that size would require months of planning. In Kherson they had barely hours. The Russian army was destroying communications and had already managed to access local routers. A sudden increase in traffic could catch their attention.
The operation also had a human component that hardly appears when we talk about “migration to the cloud.” Oleh Artemenko, head of the IT team, was blocked on the other bank of the Dnieper. Someone had to be physically at the university to operate the equipment. An employee from the IT area assumed that role. Every day I went through checkpoints to get to the building. Under the windows there was an unexploded missile. On each trip he carried the necessary keys to operate the systems in portable units. Migration took place mainly at night.
And then came one of the most critical moments: the connection dropped to 10 megabits per second. Under any normal circumstances, transferring almost 20 terabytes at that speed would be a never-ending task, at least 20 days. But The local providers, already under the control of the occupiers, had limited the speed of each connection, not the total number of connections.
Artemenko found a way out. He wrote scripts capable of dividing large data sets into thousands of small fragments. He then used AzCopy to send them simultaneously to the cloud over thousands of parallel connections. This Microsoft tool allows you to copy and synchronize files, folders, and data between Azure storage accounts. And its key feature is its speed and efficiency as it operates directly between servers.
In this way, the memory of the university began to escape from Kherson in thousands of small invisible pieces. But there was one rule: every piece of information had to arrive safely and be checked before the original was destroyed. The data was transferred, its integrity was verified in the cloud, and only then was the copy remaining in Kherson physically deleted. Until the last file arrived. Then Artemenko remotely locked the hard drives. The servers were still there, but they no longer contained what really mattered.
They had not lost a single byte of information, which meant that the university was no longer dependent on a specific location. Even his digital identity had been moved to the cloud through Microsoft Entra ID, which It allowed those responsible to retain control of the accounts and revoke compromised access. Even if someone had physically taken over the building and its servers, they had not taken control of the institution.
Today, the National Technical University of Kherson operates as an institution without a single physical campus. The administration works from Khmelnytskyy, its servers are protected in the cloud and its students are scattered around the world. Classes and exams continue online. Some students even remain in occupied territories.
And here the story returns, in some way, to Geraldine Brooks’ book. The Haggadah survived because different people, even belonging to communities at odds with each other, decided to protect it. The University of Kherson did something similar, although with one fundamental difference: His memory was no longer an object that could be hidden in a wall or transported inside a suitcase. It was information, but it could travel.
War often destroys buildings, libraries, laboratories and archives. But it can also destroy something less visible: memory. In this case, technology gave memory a second life. And that is one of the paradoxes of technology: The more intangible something seems, the easier it can be to imagine that it has no weight. But those 20 terabytes contained people, investigations, files, names and decades of work. They contained a university, the memory of a community and even its future. QPerhaps this is one of the new forms of resistance in a war: ensuring that, even if they destroy the place inhabited by an institution, they cannot destroy what allows it to remember who it is.