50T isn’t even that much data anymore. You’re talking about maybe $2k in hard drives.

Refurbished Exos X22 drives with 24GB Capacity cost around 650€ these days, those 2k are the high end even nowadays.

Refurbished

If you’re a multi-billion dollar broadcast parent company doing long term storage for a 70-year archive catalog, you can spring for new. Maybe even go Big Fancy and get some RAID drives and tape backups, for extra redundancy.

In the pre-AI days maybe, today 50TB is expensive due to increasing prices of all computer gear.

today 50TB is expensive

I don’t believe you can go back more than five years and find per-TB rates under the current rate. Ten years is straight out. Twenty years is laughable.

Meanwhile, PBS has an annual operating budget of around $340M. They can afford to manage their own data, at the scale of tens of terrabytes. And I guarantee you that whatever they’re paying Iron Mountain to host the data is multiples the cost of self-hosting.

50 TB isn’t even that much space, certainly not for a broadcaster. No reason not to have a local copy. 50 PB, I could see a small PBS affiliate not having the resources to manage locally, but you can put 50 TB in consumer-grade NAS.

That’s less storage than my Plex storage. PBS could and should definitely do better.

More specifically, this PBS affiliate (Nine PBS St Louis). It wasn’t PBS proper. This only impacted local programming archives. But that’s still a loss for the local community.

PBS likely does much better than this. Heck, a lot of their stuff is backed up in the Library of Congress.

That’s fair. The point still stands that they should do better.

Agreed. Although sometimes these smaller affiliates don’t have super-seasoned IT talent. The jobs for the department heads at these organizations often make what an intern or college grad would make in the private sector at an unremarkable mid-size tech company.

You often get people making questionable decisions simply because they don’t have seasoned IT people in the building.

All in all, this was dumb, but it also feels like a story I’ve seen before. The nonprofit media isn’t funded, and the cracks are showing.

When I started at my last job, I was fresh out of college, only Best Buy Geek Squad experience, and I was the sole IT guy at the company. All “backups” were shadow copies and VM snapshots. Shadow copies are great for simple accidental deletions, and the VMs would work as a backup 90% of the time, but it was not a valid backup solution. When I left we had onsite backups to hard drives, cloud backup in Azure blob storage, and remote replication geographically distant.

It still could have been better, but it was something. Also, we worked on government contracts and stored confidential and ITAR controlled military and government drawings and data. It was one of those things that I’m absolutely shocked that in my 9+ years there that we never had a major breach or lost any data.

Either way, like under $2000 would have bought them the storage necessary to keep these backups on-site. They still would’ve needed another backup solution for redundancy purposes, but this wouldn’t be the huge issue it seems to be now, where the data is sort of in limbo.

You can put this on 2 HDDs nowadays. This is pathetic.