Technology

Jesus Christ, what happened to P2P? Just have the files in constant circulation through the world's computers. And 50TB, while a lot, isn't beyond the reach of a well-heeled private individual to host on a NAS.

read the article, you losers

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Rescission Layoffs AI and Pubmedia Rising Stars History of Public Broadcasting Timeline Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data By Francisco RodriguezAugust 11, 2026

By Billy Hathorn - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Nine PBS in St. Louis filed a lawsuit against information management corporation Iron Mountain Data Centers July 28, seeking to recover over 50 terabytes of archival materials stored in one of the company’s Denver-based data centers.

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.

Iron Mountain has refused to return the materials to the station because its client, OSS, technically owned “the physical services housing the data” within Iron Mountain, according to the complaint.

The station requested temporary and preliminary relief that would prevent Iron Mountain from deleting, modifying or overwriting its materials in the suit. A district judge granted the motion and set a hearing for Wednesday.

In a statement to Current, Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman confirmed the station’s lawsuit against Iron Mountain and its dedication to retrieving the archival materials and programming, which she says span over “70 years of our organization’s history.”

“We are committed to ensuring we can recover and restore full access to this valuable content, which Nine PBS rightfully owns, as it holds significant historical importance for St. Louis.”

According to the lawsuit, the blocked materials include historical items such as Nine PBS’ coverage on the history of East St. Louis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Flood of 1993, which ravaged along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

‘No choice but to file’ Nine PBS entered a relationship with a company described in the complaint as “OSS’ predecessor” in 2019. This unidentified vendor provided “hardware, software and cloud-storage services” for storing the public broadcaster’s archival materials and other data.

Nine PBS renewed its contracts with the data services vendor and subsequently OSS annually, the complaint states.

When Nine PBS attempted to schedule a meeting with OSS in February to discuss renewing for 2026, OSS didn’t respond or indicate “any intention not to renew the agreement.” The agreement was set to expire on March 6.

The contract provided 30 days for Nine PBS to retrieve its data from OSS’ storage “upon termination of services.” But on March 6, OSS cut off the station’s access without warning, according to the complaint. When Nine PBS attempted to contact OSS to sort out the problem, it discovered that OSS’ website was defunct and the company had delinquency status with the Colorado Secretary of State.

To ensure the station’s data remained secure, Nine PBS investigated further and discovered that OSS had a relationship with Iron Mountain, according to the complaint.

Nine PBS sent a demand letter March 13, demanding that Iron Mountain preserve and return its data and offering “to pay any reasonable costs associated with its demand.” Iron Mountain neither confirmed nor denied the data was in its possession, the lawsuit states.

Nine PBS filed a lawsuit against OSS and its “purported” president Charles Wells in the St. Louis Circuit Court April 16, the complaint states. The broadcaster later paused the litigation after James Tramel, a “managing partner of the group that officially acquired” OSS’ assets, confirmed that Nine PBS’ data was secure within Iron Mountain’s Denver data center.

After communicating with Nine PBS for about a month, Tramel stopped responding. Weeks later, an automatic reply email from his account stated that he was no longer affiliated with OSS. Tramel revealed in a subsequent phone call that he “had been defrauded” into purchasing OSS, according to the complaint. At this point, the company’s previous owners, including Wells, Ben Nicholson, and Justine Ririe, resumed control of OSS’ operations.

After Nine PBS attempted to contact OSS leadership without success, the station returned to the St. Louis Circuit Court and obtained a default judgment against OSS. The court’s ruling stated that the station both owned its data and had an “immediate right to possess the data,” according to the complaint. The judgment also ordered OSS to return the data to Nine PBS “and/or facilitate its transfer to a new vendor.”

An attorney representing Nine PBS contacted Iron Mountain about returning the data, and noted that “litigation was imminent in Colorado,” and the company admitted that it possessed the data, the complaint states. Iron Mountain initially indicated that it wanted to avoid litigation and comply with Nine PBS’ request, but later refused to do so, citing OSS’ ownership of the infrastructure that houses the data.

Nine PBS’ complaint states that, following multiple unsuccessful attempts to retrieve its digital property, it “had no choice but to file this lawsuit to force Iron Mountain to protect and ultimately provide” the data.

Iron Mountain did not respond to a request for comment.

it sucks but they didn't follow the basic 3-2-1 rule of back-ups (3 copies, 2 types of media, 1 off-site)

so invest in friggin local storage, wtf

Piracy is media preservation

And they had zero notice?

Aw, that's sad. I loved Mr. Rogers and Dragon Tales.

Fuck cloud storage.

According to the article, the data is not clearly lost. It's that their provider, OSS, had a subcontract with Iron Mountain to host the data storage. When OSS abruptly went defunct, PBS had no direct legal path to access the data in Iron Mountain, and no assurance Iron Mountain would preserve it. It filed the lawsuit to make sure the data was preserved and affirm a legal basis to recover the data.

So the headline's use of "loses access" is accurate but a little misleading. That said, it is a great argument for reliable data preservation.

This looks like this is isolated to KETC’s locally produced shows for Missouri. They appear to be a smaller affiliate and they don’t make a ton of stuff that contributes to national and international broadcasts.

Since they have a smaller audience I imagine it’s going to be harder for KETC to find community-created backups of their stuff.

I also imagine that if Missouri gave more of a shit about public broadcasting, this affiliate would be operating with better funded / more experienced IT staff. These little affiliates really rely on a lot of volunteers and green IT folks who do the work for the experience.

Redundancy would have made this a non issue. Even just local cold storage.

The cloud is just somebody else's computer.

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.