PBS affiliate sues Iron Mountain over 50TB of lost archival data
Original: PBS station fears losing 50TB of data after being ghosted by cloud storage provider
Why This Matters
The case highlights critical risks of vendor lock-in and provider insolvency for organizations relying solely on third-party cloud storage.
St. Louis PBS affiliate Nine PBS filed a lawsuit against Iron Mountain Data Centers on July 28, seeking recovery of 50TB of irreplaceable archival data after its cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), went defunct and stopped responding.
Nine PBS, a PBS affiliate based in St. Louis, has filed a lawsuit in Denver District Court against Iron Mountain Data Centers after losing access to approximately 50TB of archival data when its cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), went defunct. OSS had been storing Nine PBS's data at an Iron Mountain facility in Denver. The data includes coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, East St. Louis history, The Great Flood of 1993, and over 11,000 files — most of which Nine PBS describes as 'unique and irreplaceable.' Nine PBS's most recent contract with OSS expired on March 6, and the station says it lost access to all data immediately upon expiration, despite contractual provisions allowing 30 days to retrieve data. Attempts to contact OSS for renewal in February went unanswered. A judge has since blocked Iron Mountain from deleting or modifying the data. In a hearing on August 13, the judge ordered Iron Mountain to hand over any physical devices holding the data and instructed Nine PBS to engage a qualified third party — potentially a former OSS employee — to retrieve the data within 30 days without compromising other OSS clients' data. Iron Mountain stated it 'does not have access to the data on the hardware/servers' and says it has acted responsibly throughout. Both parties must provide status updates by September 14.