PBS station fears losing 50TB of data after being ghosted by cloud storage provider
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Nine PBS, a St. Louis public broadcasting affiliate, has filed a lawsuit against Iron Mountain Data Centers to recover 50 terabytes of irreplaceable archival footage and historical records. The data became inaccessible after the station’s cloud storage vendor, Open Source Storage, abruptly ceased operations and failed to respond to renewal requests. According to the complaint, Iron Mountain houses the physical servers containing the materials, though the company asserts it only provides infrastructure and cannot directly access client-owned hardware. A Denver judge recently ordered Iron Mountain to surrender the physical storage devices while giving Nine PBS thirty days to secure a qualified third party for safe data extraction. Iron Mountain maintains that releasing the equipment without explicit legal authorization would violate its contractual duties and compromise the privacy of other OSS clients. Meanwhile, the station has already obtained a default judgment against the defunct storage provider confirming its ownership rights to the archives. Both organizations must submit status reports to the court by September 14 as efforts to preserve the region’s broadcast history continue.
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