posted in Technology
PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1332594/pbs-broadcaster-loses-access-to-50tb-of-data-comprising-70-years-of-tv-history-after-con
current.org/2026/08/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over-blocked-access-to-archival-data/Someone just tell me that there are backups of most of this properly archived somewhere. Just tell me that, I’m not asking if it’s true, I just need someone to say that.
The data is all there, the vendor they were using to manage the storage just went OOB, and they’re not yet being allowed to retrieve it from the vendor’s storage vendor, Iron Mountain:
The lawsuit filed in Denver District Court alleges that the station’s cloud-storage vendor, Open Source Storage, abruptly cut off access to Nine PBS’ data earlier this year without warning. It states OSS, which had a separate relationship with Iron Mountain to provide data storage, went “defunct,” leaving Nine PBS’ archives in a data center operated by Iron Mountain.
Open Source Storage
Anyone heard of this company before? Their name is impossible to search for!
Thanks. This is the latest archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20250328163113/https://www.osstorage.com/
End-to-Endless Digital Storage Solutions
Endless? lmao
Replying to @artifex@piefed.zip
Iron Mountain is obviously aware of the situation and probably doesn’t want the bad press of deleting it. PBS just needs the court order that makes them hand the data over. Because PBS isn’t iron mountains client, they can’t hand them the data without a court order.
Likely available on a torrent.
Does the local St. Louis affiliate produce anything that lots of people would want to seed? They look like a smaller affiliate compared to the WGBH and WNETs out there.
I imagine KETC is a really small shop that mostly broadcasts stuff others have made, plus hyper-local content that isn’t expensive to make.