PBS Station Fears Losing 50TB of Data After Being Ghosted By Cloud Provider (arstechnica.com)
- Reference: 0184974549
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/08/14/1747213/pbs-station-fears-losing-50tb-of-data-after-being-ghosted-by-cloud-provider
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/08/pbs-station-fears-losing-50tb-of-data-after-being-ghosted-by-cloud-storage-provider/
> After its cloud storage provider went defunct, a PBS affiliate decided to sue a data center provider to [1]regain access to 50TB of TV shows, videos, and other data dating back 70 years . As reported this week by [2]Current , a trade newspaper covering public broadcasting, St. Louis affiliate Nine PBS filed a lawsuit against Iron Mountain Data Centers on July 28, seeking access to the data. In the litigation filed in Denver District Court, Nine PBS says that its cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), used one of Iron Mountain's Denver data centers to store the channel's data. However, OSS is being unresponsive, and Nine PBS says Iron Mountain has refused to release its data.
>
> The data in question includes the station's coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, East St. Louis' history, [3]The Great Flood of 1993 , and over 11,000 files, [4]The Denver Post reported in July. The lawsuit claims that "most" of the data is "unique and irreplaceable," according to the Post. Last month, a judge blocked Iron Mountain from deleting or modifying the data.
>
> In a hearing on Wednesday, a judge ruled that Iron Mountain must hand over any physical devices holding the data, [5]Current reported today. The judge also said that Nine PBS must find a third party, such as a former OSS worker, who can help retrieve the data within 30 days and without sharing or corrupting data belonging to other OSS clients. Nine PBS is already communicating with a former OSS employee "who is willing to help," the report said. If complications arise, such as from the data being encrypted, another hearing will be scheduled. Nine PBS and Iron Mountain must provide updates by September 14.
Iron Mountain's spokesperson said the company only provides physical infrastructure, such as the building, network connectivity, power, and environmental controls. "Our customers rent space for their servers and other hardware. These are the client's assets. We don't have access to the data on the hardware/servers because they belong to our customers," the company said.
If it granted "unauthorized access to third-party hardware without a court order," Iron Mountain said the company would violate basic data privacy protocols, breach its contract with OSS, and "potentially [expose] confidential data belonging to other clients of OSS."
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/08/pbs-station-fears-losing-50tb-of-data-after-being-ghosted-by-cloud-storage-provider/
[2] https://current.org/2026/08/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over-blocked-access-to-archival-data/?wallit_nosession=1
[3] https://ny.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/ess05.sci.ess.earthsys.flood/the-great-flood-of-1993/
[4] https://www.denverpost.com/2026/07/29/st-louis-pbs-archives-denver-data-center-lawsuit/
[5] https://current.org/2026/08/judge-sets-framework-for-nine-pbs-to-retrieve-archival-data/?wallit_nosession=1
realy this is what is wrong with modern IT (Score:2)
50tb of storage is at most 5k i have over 300tb in my network at home. Why re we storing that offsite. Hell that is 3 LTO tapes. I have LTO7 in my house.
They don't deserve it back.
Re: (Score:2)
> Why re we storing that offsite.
Fires or other natural disasters destroying the building and the data with it?
Re: (Score:2)
Actually i started back in the 80s. Everything I have ever down loaded i still have. Everything I have ever created i still have.
300TB is really not all that much, I still have back ups from a pdp 11 that i ran at UCF in the 80s. It was one of the first email servers.
Every few years or so I build a new bigger one and copy everything to it. This version is a supermicro 36bay chassis with 16 8tb drives and a 4 30tb drives. this was built pre AI BS so not all not cheap but doable
it has a single HP lto7 tape d
Everybody learns the hard way (Score:4, Insightful)
I learned about backups in 1986, when the floppy disc with my word processor documents got corrupted.
It's just weird that some grownups still don't know you have to keep backups of your data.
Re: (Score:2)
Contracts are a thing. You pay someone for something, they don't do it, you sue them. The fact you think IT is magically different because you know how to do your own backup is irrelevant.
I know how to build my own house, does that mean I am "not a grown up" when I pay someone else to do it?
Re: (Score:3)
I think you missed something here. They had only one copy of the data. Paying someone to take care of it isn't the same as keeping a backup copy.
Re: (Score:2)
Agree in spirit, but if one vendor breaching one contract means you're instantly and irreparably out of business overnight... You second-source it or do it in-house!
No court order in the world can un-burn a dollar.
Re: (Score:2)
That's why I always kept a backup floppy pinned to the fridge with a magnet...
Fault (Score:5, Informative)
You put ALL of your data on one cloud provider with no local backup? Loosing that data is YOUR fault. It's a few thousand dollars for a half dozen hard drives to store 50TB. Or heck, 50 100GB M-DISC Blu-Rays for less than that. That's what the Disney Imagineering sound department does - M-DISC backup, live copy on file servers, then secondary cloud backup.
It always sounds like a lot of money to the bean counters until you explain to them the station probably spent tens of millions of dollars producing that content, and all it takes is a corporate meltdown or technical SNAFU and all of it is gone.
Re: (Score:2)
I threw up a little.
Re: (Score:2)
> Loosing that data is YOUR fault.
And breaching contractual obligations it the other parties fault. People seem to switch off their brain when it comes to backups. Just because you *can* do something yourself doesn't excuse a contractually obligated partner from fulfilling their part of a contract. No one is talking about a google "you're the product" free tier here. You pay for something you should get it, professionally, and expect to sue if you don't.
Re: (Score:2)
> You put ALL of your data on one cloud provider with no local backup? Loosing that data is YOUR fault. I It always sounds like a lot of money to the bean counters until you explain to them the station probably spent tens of millions of dollars producing that content, and all it takes is a corporate meltdown or technical SNAFU and all of it is gone.
Having a local backup defeats the purpose of having a cloud provider. PBS, because of their financial situation, used a fly by night cloud provider. That's a no no. If a cloud provider is going to manage PBS data (with no local backup) then they should have used a reputable provider. Hopefully PBS management realizes that the solution that looks cheapest at first often turns out to be the most expensive in the long run.
Re: (Score:2)
> It always sounds like a lot of money to the bean counters until you explain to them the station probably spent tens of millions of dollars producing that content, and all it takes is a corporate meltdown or technical SNAFU and all of it is gone.
lol, do you not know how public broadcasting works?
Don't put anything in the cloud... (Score:2)
... that you can't get out in 2 hours or less. If it's mission critical that is.
they shutdown and did not remove the hardware from (Score:2)
they shutdown and did not remove the hardware from the rack?
Credit to Iron Mountain, and WTF for PBS (Score:2)
Firstly, Iron Mountain refusing to hand over data without a court order, is good to see.
That being said, 50TB isn't that much data, and frankly unless the data is in the PB level, why wouldn't PBS have their own local backups? I just checked Amazon at 4:15pm ET on the 14th of August 2026, a 30 TB Iron Wolf Pro HDD is ~$1 600. Assuming a raidz3 (ZFS), and assuming you only make a single pool, 8 disks @ 30TB would give you 150TB of usable storage, which would cost $12 800, and assuming you want to mirror
Lose 1KB transaction, shame on Cloud Provider (Score:2)
Lose 50TB you didn't back up independently, shame on customer.
Now sack your IT Manager and hire someone competent.
Idiots, all of them (Score:2)
It's rare to find a judge that has no idea how the laws or court orders work AND doesn't know how IT works.
Just kidding. No it isn't. You can't order a company to do that, even in the case of a civil action pending.
Re: Idiots, all of them (Score:2)
Lolol of course they can. The data doesn't actually belong to the intermediary and it certainly doesn't belong to iron mountain. It's good that they required a court order, because the party requesting the data is not the party that provided it, but it's still the PBS station's data and they still have a right to it.
Re: (Score:2)
If there was, say, a physical self-storage company, lets call them Tim's Self Storage, and person A paid someone person B to store a bunch of their hard drives in a box in a storage unit that person B rents from Tim's Self Storage - and person B took the box and the hard drives and locked them in the storage unit, and then... disappeared, took the money and ran, refused to talk to person A - it's not entirely unreasonable for person A to contact Tim's Self Storage, maybe even go to court, to get Tim's Self
The cloud is a trap (Score:2)
Run away
But first, back up your data
"Open Source Storage", huh? (Score:2)
"But they were so much *cheaper* than AWS! Two providers each with a copy? Do you think I'm made of money?"
Escrow service for data? (Score:2)
You should have put the data in an escrow for such a situation. We have had an escrow service for our source code and we included that with the purchase of our product where if we disappeared the customer could get the source. Of course 50TB escrow would cost a fortune.
Why no local copy? (Score:2)
This isn't a lot of data. I know someone with half this in their personal Plex library.
So: why no local copy in addition to the cloud copy?
Iron Mountain losing data? (Score:1)
Ah yes, Arson Mountain did it again.
This is why tapers/Tivo-ers/stream recorders exist (Score:1)
Never trust something broadcast will exist later on.
50TB? What is their IT department thinking? (Score:1)
My home NAS holds 50TB - that's 8 x 8TB in Raid 5, striped for 7+1. Before the AI nightmare sent prices through the roof, the whole thing cost under two grand, and that's with dual SSDs for read/write buffering. Let's see what they might have been spending for cloud storage:
Google charges $ 0.02 / GB / Month - so 50TB is a grand a month. By the end of a year, they could have had a shelf full of NAS units, a couple in the CEO's garage, whatever. Even if their provider was charging half that, they'd _sti
Shame on them! (Score:4, Insightful)
You trusted a cloud service provider to back up all your data forever???
Re: (Score:2)
That's kind of been the bread and butter for cloud providers - "data velocity". They say: keep all your stuff on our cloud, it'll be safe forever, you don't need to worry about it.
A single copy is zero copies and 2 is 1. This is overlooked on all clouds, on the basis that 3 copies on a cloud provider is still 1 copy.
This kind of oversight failure has ended many companies when they've had DR scenarios. I know of 2 that had to close shop because the egress cost of all their data from AWS was larger than insur
Re: (Score:3)
Multiple local copies, preferably one at each different site. My real problem with cloud data storage is I don't trust networks. I started out as a network software engineer in '83. I don't trust networks 'cause I know the software for them was written by idiots like me...
Re: (Score:2)
[verse]
There is no clever coding or cost
That can guarantee no data loss
Nothing can protect it from the likes
Of military action, or asteroid strikes
[verse]
But there is no need to invoke vicious thugs
The biggest losses are from software bugs
And fat-fingered admins who erase
There is no cure when you run out of space
[verse]
Single mode of failure's in between
It's not the best, but not the worst I've seen
Any 1 of n up does quite well
Every 1 of n up ... is hell
[verse]
Triplication loss requires losing three
Erasure
Re: (Score:2)
> You trusted a cloud service provider to back up all your data forever???
Hell no.
Re: (Score:2)
No, they trusted a contractual partner to fulfill the requirements of their contract. This is no different than paying someone to build you a house and them not doing it. The complaint is not that they weren't backing up data forever, it's that they are unresponsive and not handing over the data.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree but at the end of the day there is no amount of money they contracted partner can pay back that will bring back data that is lost/stolen. Just like having insurance that covers your house burning down; you'll get some money but you won't get your family pictures, heirlooms, etc back.
Something like the 3-2-1 backup strategy should apply here. X copies on Y number of providers and at least 1 is immutable.
Re: (Score:2)
No they trusted a cloud service to store the only copy of their data. Cloud backups as an offsite are fine, but 1-2-3 FFS. If it's data you want, it should never only exist in one place.