Judge orders Iron Mountain to help Nine PBS recover 50 terabytes of archival data
Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data
A Denver judge ruled that Nine PBS, not the defunct storage vendor OSS, owns its archival data held in an Iron Mountain data center. The court ordered Iron Mountain to cooperate with Nine PBS and a third-party expert to retrieve the data within 30 days, while Nine PBS must pay past-due storage fees and indemnify Iron Mountain against damage to other clients' data. Updates are due by Sept. 14.
These archives represent an important part of our region’s history, and we look forward to ensuring their preservation and protection through the Court-approved process.
- hn_throwaway_99
I think stories like these highlight the need for clearer (not necessarily more) regulations around contractor/subcontractor/client relationships and what happens when one of them goes tits up.
There were rampant issues in the fintech world that exploded when Synapse, a banking as a service provider, went bankrupt and their ledger didn't match what partner banks had in their accounts. End users were told "your deposits are FDIC insured", but in bankruptcy court the judge was sort of at a loss over how to rectify things - the banks weren't insolvent, and the FDIC (rightfully) said "hey, this isn't our problem, our regulated entities are in compliance". Looks like a similar situation happened here, where the contractors are both doing the "not it" thing.
I feel like a lot of tech innovation and "business process innovation" over the past 15 years was just ignoring regulations that were built up over decades, only discovering the reasons for those regulations when the tide went out and seeing that lots of companies had been pantsless the whole time.
- js2
Open Source Storage (OSS), the vendor in question, was around for two decades before going out of business last year. The first and last archived versions of its web site:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040628023451/https://www.ossto...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250329140721/https://www.ossto...
(The first version isn't too exciting. It's a broken Flash site.)
- Animats
The court got this right. This is when you need a special master to help with cleanup after a bankruptcy.
We saw something like this when TechShop went bankrupt, with member property in storage on the premises. The bankruptcy trustee set up a procedure where former members could make an appointment to retrieve their property, escorted by a representative of the trustee. Huge pain, but necessary.
- vondur
I'm a bit confused from Iron Mountain's response about how they are worried that data could be co-mingled with other data? That would be an interesting way to back up data.
- dredmorbius
Earlier coverage (St. Louis KETC / Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain for data access):
"Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data"
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285418>
This is working out largely as I'd suggested it should, albeit with a court's intervention. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293058>.
I'd still argue that I.M. should have anticipated this situation, and have some process in place to address it. "See a court" might well be part of that process.