PBS station loses 70 years of TV history after cloud vendor goes defunct
Nine PBS could lose 70 years of archival materials after cloud vendor defunct
Nine PBS, a public TV station, has lost access to over 50TB of archival data spanning 70 years after its contracted cloud storage vendor, Open Source Storage (OSS), abruptly shut down. The station had planned to renew its contract in March but the company went dark, cutting off access despite a 30-day grace period. Nine PBS is now suing Iron Mountain, the data center hosting the archives, to ensure the data is preserved.
This wouldn't have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and populated it with a few hard drives.
- rsync
Free account, indefinitely, to whoever needs it to store this data … including the storage vendor.
Just email…
- jeremyjh
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.
- walrus01
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.
- smallerize
Loses "access to" the data. The data is still there, they're just waiting for a court order.
- Crosseye_Jack
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)
- pudgywalsh
Where have I heard this story before?
- ApolloFortyNine
>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.
- thelastgallon
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?