Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data

thelastgallon

This might be the website: https://www.osstorage.com/ I wonder how they got the contract? Seems to be 4 people 'employed' at this company. Of which, one is retired, one is "Linkedin Member", one is a controller and the last one is a social media person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabelle-anderson-7aa250b5/ So, just the person to deposit checks and a social media person to get paid. Who exactly is left to work on storage infrastructure? https://www.linkedin.com/company/osstorage/people/

treetalker

This underscores the importance of the Internet Archive and people like Marion Stokes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes ).

adolph

Not PBS but an affiliate broadcaster and the data is not lost as in destroyed, but legally encumbered. Full headline: PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation The channel’s attorney also reached out to Iron Mountain to inform the company of the pending case in Colorado; Iron Mountain finally admitted to holding the data. Iron Mountain initially agreed to turn over Nine PBS’ data, but it eventually backtracked and claimed that OSS owned the data it stored. Because of this, Nine PBS now has no choice but to sue Iron Mountain, too, to ensure the data is not deleted.

blltprfmnk

Title should be updated to reflect the fact that this is a single PBS station.

ktm5j

> This wouldn't have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and populated it with a few hard drives. Okay hang on now.. that strategy comes with its own risks. Risks that I imagine PBS was trying to avoid by using a third party that specializes in archival data storage. This is a silly takeaway. Edit: I was too quick to comment. I think they are suggesting that the NAS should have been used in addition to the third party storage, which is actually a great takeaway.

Crosseye_Jack

Ok, it sucks, losing data always sucks, but what ever happened to the 3-2-1 backup rule? even if your off site backup provider goes tits up, your on site backup is still there. If you don't want on site, a second off site provider, 50TB on backblaze would be an extra ~$350 per month (prob less if they were to commit to capacity instead of using their PAYG service)

dehrmann

> since 2019 At that point, why wouldn't you pick a major cloud vendor? This feels like more of a governance failure.

Good4boothee

Isn't 50TB just 6 years of videos, in even the best case (1GB/h)?

rsync

Free account, indefinitely, to whoever needs it to store this data … including the storage vendor. Just email…

roughly

Calling out Nine PBS for not accounting for the fact that their vendor could effectively just decide to commit crimes to get out of their contract and their vendor’s vendor could just decide to compound the problem in the face of a court order is wild. Yes, we’ve all learned to anticipate everyone else on the planet being an absolute shitheel; no, Nine PBS did not do anything wrong by assuming the professionals they were paying to render a professional service to them would do so. We’re all paranoid engineers, but this is absolutely no goddamn way to run a society.

RIMR

From the article: >This wouldn't have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and populated it with a few hard drives. Look, I know that a certain percentage of Tom's Hardware articles are just sales pitches for a NAS, but this is asinine. Iron Mountain deals largely in tape storage. 50TB of tapes fits in one of their small archive boxes. If they're using the latest tech (LTO-9), it fits on 3 tapes. This is exactly how you are supposed to store archival media for decades, not on a NAS. A NAS is for storing the files you need to actively access.

ApolloFortyNine

>storing over 50TB of data I thought this would be like the backups I've heard broadcasters have of every broadcast they've ever had (I've heard of people being able to request 20 year old news clips before). But just 50TB of data? Duplicating that would have been cheap and trivial.

ck2

even r/DataHoarder won't be able to help that one

arjie

It's funny to me that entire companies exist that have a fraction of storage that I personally have in a datacenter on flash let alone in total. 50 TiB is so little. It's like $7k annually on R2 and under a thousand bucks on S3 Glacier Deep Archive. I suppose it's just whoever knew the cousin of whoever at whatever position of authority but it's funny how just using deep glacier means he would have such insane margins over paying Iron Mountain.

anarticle

Drives are cheap, data is expensive. I work in several labs where I have to give this advice, which some labs are smart enough to make an ersatz backup that we store somewhere (PI's house) as a cheap offsite. Even a partial recovery is great in the face of fire/flood/explosion, or the most common error: IT fucks it up and then says "oh well". Hope someone has some copies and they can rebuild, what a nightmare.

gwbas1c

When I worked for Syncplicity, we offered an on-site version for "cloud" storage specifically for this reason. (Ok, not specifically for this reason, it was because customers demanded it and an on-site version of our product was a great differentiator in our niche.)

dredmorbius

The affected entity is a single PBS station , which As Is the Present Custom fails to provide call letters or geographic location. "Nine PBS" seems to be < https://www.ninepbs.org/ >, A/K/A KETC, St. Louis, MO. < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KETC > The upstream cited article which should be subbed in for this submission does clearly identify the station in the first line of its report: < https://current.org/2026/08/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over... >. (I've submitted this to HN's mods via email. The original submission was to a very poor TomsHardware link.) OT: The tendency of local broadcasters to fail to identify either on websites OR QUITE OFTEN ON BROADCASTS THEMSELVES even vaguely where they operate is ... a long-standing annoyance of mine. Sure, local audiences may know, but those passing through, or catching the signal at a distance, likely won't. I've spent more than a few nights at higher elevations (campgrounds, highways) listening to clear channel stations reporting on weather and traffic "in the local area", sometimes for hours, without ever hearing what "the local area" is . That for signals travelling hundreds of km, and not infrequently multiple thousands of km. (Don't get me started on entire countries where stations are identified simply by number, e.g., "Channel 4" in the UK.)

ggm

Intermediaries. When it's not the DNS it's the anomalous status of intermediaries.

amiga386

They should've kept the archives in their intern's car, like the State of Ohio did https://www.newson6.com/story/5e3687772f69d76f6209d656/tape-...

paxys

All this over 50 TB of data. Could have created an in-house replicated NAS with like $2500 worth of hardware.