--- title: Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to... description: Nine PBS, a public television station in St. Louis, has sued information management company Iron Mountain Data Centers to recover over 50 terabytes of archival... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over-blocked-access-to-archival-data-euyl4gaph twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data | daily.dev og:description: Nine PBS, a public television station in St. Louis, has sued information management company Iron Mountain Data Centers to recover over 50 terabytes of archival... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over-blocked-access-to-archival-data-euyl4gaph og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/eUyL4GApH.png og:image:alt: Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Nine PBS, a public television station in St. Louis, has sued information management company Iron Mountain Data Centers to recover over 50 terabytes of archival data spanning 70 years of the station's history. The data was originally stored with vendor Open Source Storage (OSS), which went defunct and cut off access without warning in March. Nine PBS discovered OSS had a separate storage relationship with Iron Mountain, but Iron Mountain has refused to return the data, citing OSS's technical ownership of the physical servers housing it. A court previously granted Nine PBS a default judgment against OSS confirming its ownership rights, but Iron Mountain still declined to release the archives, prompting the new Colorado lawsuit and a request for a temporary restraining order to prevent deletion or alteration of the data. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 166 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-14). **TL;DR:** Discussion mostly centers on how Nine PBS should have followed basic backup redundancy (3-2-1 rule) instead of relying solely on a defunct vendor, while others push back that Iron Mountain is reasonably withholding data absent a court order clarifying ownership, and some highlight the station's underfunded nonprofit status as mitigating context. **Sentiment:** 5% positive · 30% mixed · 65% skeptical **The case for** - Some argue Iron Mountain's caution is legally and operationally reasonable since it has no direct relationship with Nine PBS and can't verify ownership without OSS's cooperation. - Several note the data volume (50TB) is now small and cheap to duplicate, meaning a simple additional backup could have prevented this entirely. - One commenter (identified as rsync.net's maintainer) offered free indefinite storage to help resolve the situation. **The pushback** - Many commenters criticize Nine PBS for apparently having no independent backup and violating the well-known 3-2-1 backup rule. - Some speculate the choice to outsource to OSS reflects cost-cutting or poor IT decision-making by an underfunded nonprofit station. - Iron Mountain is criticized by several as expensive, old-fashioned, and predatory in its contracts based on past experiences. - A default judgment against OSS is seen by some as insufficient to compel Iron Mountain specifically to release the data. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Heavy debate over backup best practices and blame-assigning toward Nine PBS coexists with sympathy for its underfunded nonprofit status and skepticism toward Iron Mountain's business practices and legal posture. **Hottest debate:** Whether Nine PBS is primarily to blame for not having independent backups versus Iron Mountain/OSS being the real culprits for withholding or mishandling the data. **Open questions** - Is this genuinely the only copy of the archival data, or do physical tapes still exist onsite? - What specifically is Iron Mountain's contractual obligation now that OSS is defunct, and can a judgment against OSS compel Iron Mountain to release the data? - Was OSS committing fraud by not paying Iron Mountain, or did Iron Mountain simply raise prices/complicate retrieval? **Highlights** > Iron Mountain is typically very stringent on their retention/disposal policies. Storytime, since I'm no longer under NDAs for the company, over a decade ago somewhere that I worked, a disgruntled employee who decided to quit, made a point to within a week of quitting, take a whole bunch of important physical documents they had (because, FBOW, our email and other data retention was so bad, it was safer to have them as prints) and threw them all in our fancy Iron Mountain 'disposal' bin. Apparently due to the agreement with them, short of a court order, only specific employees/titles in the company were allowed to be the persons to retrieve them. Keeping that situation in mind, it's clear that this dance for better or worse is part of their posturing as a retention center with very strict rules to ensure compliance while also avoiding snooping. > — [to11mtm on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293593) > Free account, indefinitely, to whoever needs it to store this data … including the storage vendor. Just email… > — [rsync on hackernews · 5 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49287706) > > is PBS that bears responsibility here. Very likely the decision by PBS to hire OSS was corrupt Don't blame corruption for what was most likely extremely strained budgets. Local TV stations like KTEC (Nine PBS) tend to be severely understaffed and underpaid. Realistically, they went with OSS because the quote for a local MSP was cheaper than the cost of hiring additional headcount (a $70k salary ends up costing roughly $100k for an employer). (Source: occasionally dealt with these kinds of accounts back when I was an SE and later PM) Edit: I'm right - they only have 1 IT/Software employee managing the entire organization which only has a budget of $30M after losing $1.8M in federal funding. Oof, that is a horrible position to be in with so many dicks on HN. You'd assume SWEs would have sympathy for other SWEs. Some HNers should have been taught better manners by their parents. > — [alephnerd on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49294206) > It's not that simple. If I'm a host and someone shows up without the keys or passwords and says "that's my data, I was a client of a client of yours", I have no idea how to tell if that's true and no idea how to deliver the data. Maybe they mixed data from many companies on the same volume like S3 does. Maybe there were ACLs on that. Maybe it includes PII. Maybe it's a bunch of shards and needs an index on OSS servers to reassemble. Maybe it's encrypted by keys OSS had. > — [scosman on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292632) > I read it as a statement of just how little data this is by modern standards more than anything else. This company is going out of business and PBS is losing this valuable data, and there's legal drama and multiple corporate entities involved, and if you read all that you might think this is some amazing amount of data that is actually difficult to deal with. Instead it's something I could stroll down to Best Buy right now, plonk down my personal credit card, and walk out with enough stuff to do a credible backup job myself, and we're not even challenging my credit limit or anything. 10 years ago, this was a lot of data. It isn't anymore and it makes it that much more bizarre that they're having that much trouble getting it back. It would be less to just give them access and let them download it themselves and perhaps stick it somewhere else temporarily than to pay lawyers to deal with legal filings. To put it in vaguely physical terms, what once was a university library is now a good solid bookshelf full of stuff. Legally wrangling over a huge library is one thing, but if it's just a bookshelf, metaphorically, let them come in for an hour and clean it out themselves rather than bringing in the law. Obviously not a perfect metaphor on data size, this is more about how lawsuits are more of a hassle then just giving it to them. > — [jerf on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286966) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285418) · 294 points · 166 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289078) · 4 points · 0 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [DSHR's Blog: Internet Archive's Storage](https://daily.dev/posts/dshr-s-blog-internet-archive-s-storage-tkqwoob59) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting](https://daily.dev/posts/the-long-now-of-the-web-inside-the-internet-archive-s-fight-against-forgetting-xhu7eyzou) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Japanese energy firm loses drive with data of 10.9 million clients](https://daily.dev/posts/japanese-energy-firm-loses-drive-with-data-of-10-9-million-clients-ge2w9xhyt) · BleepingComputer · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [News publishers are blocking the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine](https://daily.dev/posts/news-publishers-are-blocking-the-internet-archive-s-wayback-machine-e98mfc4a6) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over-blocked-access-to-archival-data-euyl4gaph) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over-blocked-access-to-archival-data-euyl4gaph","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over-blocked-access-to-archival-data-euyl4gaph"},"datePublished":"2026-08-13T22:07:02.476Z","dateModified":"2026-08-14T20:15:29.818Z","description":"Nine PBS, a public television station in St. Louis, has sued information management company Iron Mountain Data Centers to recover over 50 terabytes of archival...","image":"https://current.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Denver_CO_City_and_County_Building_IMG_5541-crop-scaled-e1786478301201.jpeg","thumbnailUrl":"https://current.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Denver_CO_City_and_County_Building_IMG_5541-crop-scaled-e1786478301201.jpeg","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over-blocked-access-to-archival-data-euyl4gaph","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"","timeRequired":"PT5M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data"}]} ```