Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
A PBS affiliate sues Iron Mountain to recover 50 TB of archival data held by a defunct vendor.
Nine PBS of St. Louis filed suit July 28 in Denver District Court against Iron Mountain Data Centers. The station's cloud-storage vendor, Open Source Storage, went defunct and cut off access in March. Iron Mountain refuses to return the data, claiming OSS owns the physical servers. The data includes 70 years of historical coverage, including the Great Flood of 1993. A judge granted temporary relief to prevent deletion. A hearing is set for Wednesday.
What commenters are saying
Commenters clarify that Nine PBS is the St. Louis affiliate, not a cluster of stations. Several note the data is legally encumbered, not lost. A camps forms: some fault the station for lacking backups, while others argue a NAS alone carries its own risks. A second camp recommends the Internet Archive's Vault service as a superior custodian. One user warns not to rely on the Internet Archive as the sole backup, citing past deletions of certain content.