Free account, indefinitely, to whoever needs it to store this data … including the storage vendor.

Just email…

It’s entirely possible that Iron Mountain will be happy to turnover the data but needs a court judgement to do so without incurring more legal exposure. The article says the system belongs to OSS. If this is something like a colo arrangement then probably that is the only reasonable position to take. They can’t just go crack open a customer’s server and pull data out of it for whoever asserts a claim on it.

Ok, it sucks, losing data always sucks, but what ever happened to the 3-2-1 backup rule? even if your off site backup provider goes tits up, your on site backup is still there.

If you don't want on site, a second off site provider, 50TB on backblaze would be an extra ~$350 per month (prob less if they were to commit to capacity instead of using their PAYG service)

>storing over 50TB of data

I thought this would be like the backups I've heard broadcasters have of every broadcast they've ever had (I've heard of people being able to request 20 year old news clips before).

But just 50TB of data? Duplicating that would have been cheap and trivial.

This might be the website: https://www.osstorage.com/

I wonder how they got the contract? Seems to be 4 people 'employed' at this company. Of which, one is retired, one is "Linkedin Member", one is a controller and the last one is a social media person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabelle-anderson-7aa250b5/

So, just the person to deposit checks and a social media person to get paid. Who exactly is left to work on storage infrastructure?

https://www.linkedin.com/company/osstorage/people/

There's an update about a hearing yesterday that has more details about the server setup and what the concerns on both sides were: https://current.org/2026/08/judge-sets-framework-for-nine-pb...

With the stuff about "corruption" and losing the data if the server is shut down, I wonder if part of the concern is about losing in-memory decryption keys.

The situation is something we all will have to deal with as time goes on - this is an archive. If I remember rightly Facebook used to archive by just putting the old hard disks in a room. At the volume of data we are heading towards most successful companies will be in the hard position of finding some way of keeping data for the lifetime of a human being - this is hard

It's funny to me that entire companies exist that have a fraction of storage that I personally have in a datacenter on flash let alone in total. 50 TiB is so little. It's like $7k annually on R2 and under a thousand bucks on S3 Glacier Deep Archive. I suppose it's just whoever knew the cousin of whoever at whatever position of authority but it's funny how just using deep glacier means he would have such insane margins over paying Iron Mountain.

The news article is really not clear about whether this was, relative to the company "OSS":

a) OSS is a colocation customer with its own hardware colocating it inside an Iron Mountain datacenter. In which OSS owned the bare metal and paid iron mountain for rack space and power.

or

b) OSS is a dedicated hardware customer of Iron Mountain running a service on bare metal owned by Iron Mountain, and has gone defunct, leaving behind a bunch of servers/storage arrays that would in normal circumstances get wiped/reprovisioned.

From the point of view of a customer of OSS (PBS), that's two extremely different things.

If it's scenario A, I don't see how PBS has any claim against Iron Mountain. Your typical datacenter colo host for bare metal hardware owned by a customer has no involvement whatsoever in the condition or operation of the data, operating system, filesystems, RAID arrays, ZFS, etc of how the customer has set up their environment. Nor any ability to do anything with it. A colocation host that hasn't been paid for its rack space and power will typically have clauses in its colo contracts allowing for seizure and sale of abandoned hardware after a certain period of time.

Loses "access to" the data. The data is still there, they're just waiting for a court order.

They should've kept the archives in their intern's car, like the State of Ohio did

https://www.newson6.com/story/5e3687772f69d76f6209d656/tape-...

This underscores the importance of the Internet Archive and people like Marion Stokes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes).

> This wouldn't have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and populated it with a few hard drives.

Okay hang on now.. that strategy comes with its own risks. Risks that I imagine PBS was trying to avoid by using a third party that specializes in archival data storage. This is a silly takeaway.

Edit: I was too quick to comment. I think they are suggesting that the NAS should have been used in addition to the third party storage, which is actually a great takeaway.

I get why having an offsite backup is handy. But for less than $10k you can easily get a 4 bay NAS with 96TB storage for a local backup.

This smacks of saving pennies on IT to spend dollars on lawyers.

Such data should never be held by a third party unless it is one of several duplicates.

I keep photos on Google and MS but they are short term storage only and never the only copy.

When I worked for Syncplicity, we offered an on-site version for "cloud" storage specifically for this reason. (Ok, not specifically for this reason, it was because customers demanded it and an on-site version of our product was a great differentiator in our niche.)

Not PBS but an affiliate broadcaster and the data is not lost as in destroyed, but legally encumbered.

Full headline: PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation

The channel’s attorney also reached out to Iron Mountain to inform the company of the pending case in Colorado; Iron Mountain finally admitted to holding the data. Iron Mountain initially agreed to turn over Nine PBS’ data, but it eventually backtracked and claimed that OSS owned the data it stored. Because of this, Nine PBS now has no choice but to sue Iron Mountain, too, to ensure the data is not deleted.

Calling out Nine PBS for not accounting for the fact that their vendor could effectively just decide to commit crimes to get out of their contract and their vendor’s vendor could just decide to compound the problem in the face of a court order is wild. Yes, we’ve all learned to anticipate everyone else on the planet being an absolute shitheel; no, Nine PBS did not do anything wrong by assuming the professionals they were paying to render a professional service to them would do so. We’re all paranoid engineers, but this is absolutely no goddamn way to run a society.

Isn't 50TB just 6 years of videos, in even the best case (1GB/h)?

Intermediaries. When it's not the DNS it's the anomalous status of intermediaries.

The magic of public-private partnerships strikes again.

Like most of the time, this will probably be held for some kind of extortionist legal ransom. We just love handing our stuff over to bad-faith third-parties in the name of some kind of imagined freedom. Just can't get enough of it. Public infrastructure, national archives, city services, we just seem to be completely deer-in-the-headlights when they pull this stuff on the daily...

So here we go again. We blindly trust in private parties always magically acting in good faith when there's billions on the table incentivizing them not to.

We've been doing it like this for 40 years and it hasn't worked, but I'm sure our ideological commitments will bend reality eventually.

This is your money btw.

> since 2019

At that point, why wouldn't you pick a major cloud vendor? This feels like more of a governance failure.

I don't trust cloud services; I bought a 12T USB hard drive for my backups.

All this over 50 TB of data. Could have created an in-house replicated NAS with like $2500 worth of hardware.

Where have I heard this story before?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMlOkQdMQ0w

even r/DataHoarder won't be able to help that one

Drives are cheap, data is expensive.

I work in several labs where I have to give this advice, which some labs are smart enough to make an ersatz backup that we store somewhere (PI's house) as a cheap offsite. Even a partial recovery is great in the face of fire/flood/explosion, or the most common error: IT fucks it up and then says "oh well".

Hope someone has some copies and they can rebuild, what a nightmare.

From the article:

>This wouldn't have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and populated it with a few hard drives.

Look, I know that a certain percentage of Tom's Hardware articles are just sales pitches for a NAS, but this is asinine. Iron Mountain deals largely in tape storage. 50TB of tapes fits in one of their small archive boxes. If they're using the latest tech (LTO-9), it fits on 3 tapes.

This is exactly how you are supposed to store archival media for decades, not on a NAS. A NAS is for storing the files you need to actively access.

Title should be updated to reflect the fact that this is a single PBS station.

The affected entity is a single PBS station, which As Is the Present Custom fails to provide call letters or geographic location.

"Nine PBS" seems to be <https://www.ninepbs.org/>, A/K/A KETC, St. Louis, MO.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KETC>

The upstream cited article which should be subbed in for this submission does clearly identify the station in the first line of its report: <https://current.org/2026/08/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over...>.

(I've submitted this to HN's mods via email. The original submission was to a very poor TomsHardware link.)

OT: The tendency of local broadcasters to fail to identify either on websites OR QUITE OFTEN ON BROADCASTS THEMSELVES even vaguely where they operate is ... a long-standing annoyance of mine. Sure, local audiences may know, but those passing through, or catching the signal at a distance, likely won't.

I've spent more than a few nights at higher elevations (campgrounds, highways) listening to clear channel stations reporting on weather and traffic "in the local area", sometimes for hours, without ever hearing what "the local area" is. That for signals travelling hundreds of km, and not infrequently multiple thousands of km.

(Don't get me started on entire countries where stations are identified simply by number, e.g., "Channel 4" in the UK.)

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