--- title: PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising... description: Nine PBS is suing Iron Mountain data center after losing access to 50TB of archival data spanning 70 years of programming, stored with cloud vendor Open Source... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/pbs-broadcaster-loses-access-to-50tb-of-data-comprising-70-years-of-tv-history-after-contracted-clou-9jgxysw0t twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archiv | daily.dev og:description: Nine PBS is suing Iron Mountain data center after losing access to 50TB of archival data spanning 70 years of programming, stored with cloud vendor Open Source... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/pbs-broadcaster-loses-access-to-50tb-of-data-comprising-70-years-of-tv-history-after-contracted-clou-9jgxysw0t og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/9jGxysW0T.png og:image:alt: PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archiv 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. # PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archiv **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 8 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Nine PBS is suing Iron Mountain data center after losing access to 50TB of archival data spanning 70 years of programming, stored with cloud vendor Open Source Storage (OSS), which appears to have gone defunct. OSS cut off access despite a 30-day post-contract grace period, and its website vanished while it was listed as delinquent with Colorado's Secretary of State. A court ruled Nine PBS has rights to its data and ordered OSS to facilitate transfer to a new vendor, but Iron Mountain, which holds the underlying storage, backtracked on handing over the data, claiming OSS owns it. The station reportedly lacks proper backups, violating the standard 3-2-1 backup rule of keeping three copies across two media types with one offsite. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What happened to Nine PBS's 70 years of archived TV data with its cloud storage vendor? Nine PBS lost access to 50TB of archival data after its cloud storage vendor, Open Source Storage (OSS), abruptly cut off access despite a contractual 30-day grace period following contract expiration. OSS's website disappeared and the company was listed as delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State. A court ruled Nine PBS retains rights to the data, but Iron Mountain, which physically holds it, has refused to release it, claiming OSS owns it, prompting a second lawsuit. _Following vendor lock-in and data custody disputes like this helps teams rethink backup strategy on daily.dev._ ### What is the 3-2-1 backup rule for data storage? The 3-2-1 backup rule recommends keeping three copies of data stored across two different types of media, with at least one copy kept offsite. This approach is meant to protect against single points of failure such as vendor shutdowns, hardware failure, fire, or accidental deletion, which is precisely the risk Nine PBS faced when its sole cloud storage vendor became unreachable. _Developers designing resilient storage architectures track backup best practices like this on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 90 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-14). **TL;DR:** Commenters largely see this as a self-inflicted backup failure by the station (violating basic 3-2-1 practices) compounded by a legally murky standoff where Iron Mountain reasonably won't release data without proof of ownership, while OSS appears to be a possibly fraudulent shell operation. **Sentiment:** 5% positive · 25% mixed · 70% skeptical **The case for** - Some acknowledge the station reasonably outsourced to a specialist rather than self-hosting, which isn't inherently foolish. - A few note Iron Mountain's caution about verifying ownership before releasing data is legally sensible, not obstruction. - One commenter offered a free storage account to help the station recover, showing community goodwill. **The pushback** - Many argue 50TB is tiny by modern standards and a cheap NAS or cloud backup (Backblaze, S3 Glacier) could have prevented this entirely. - Several suspect OSS was a nearly-empty shell company (just a few LinkedIn profiles) and question how it won the contract. - Commenters criticize the station for relying on a single vendor since 2019 instead of following the 3-2-1 backup rule. - Some think Iron Mountain itself is predatory/expensive and may be leveraging the situation to raise prices or complicate retrieval. - Doubts raised about whether the archive was even fully digitized, given legacy tape/film formats complicate the 'just buy a NAS' advice. - Criticism that the underlying Tom's Hardware article reads as AI-generated affiliate content pushing NAS purchases. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Discussion mostly faults the station's lack of proper backups and questions how a seemingly tiny shell vendor got the contract, while debating the legal complexity of Iron Mountain's refusal to release data. **Hottest debate:** Whether the station was negligent for not maintaining its own backup versus whether the real fault lies with the vendor chain (OSS/Iron Mountain) and unclear legal ownership. **Open questions** - Was the archive actually digitized, or does it include physical tape/film formats? - How did OSS, an apparently near-empty shell company, win this storage contract? - How long had OSS stopped paying Iron Mountain before access was cut off? - Is OSS's non-payment simple business failure or outright fraud? **Highlights** > 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? https://www.linkedin.com/company/osstorage/people/ > — [thelastgallon on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285827) > 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292632) > I store my belongings with a storage company. They rent facilities from a property owner. The storage company goes under while my stuff is still in the storage unit. I go to the property owner and say my stuff was in there. They say, no, that's owned by the storage company. Incorrect - the belongings were owned by me the entire time, the storage company was just holding it for me. I need to prove it was mine, but I don't lose property rights just because it's in someone else's possession. Likewise if I store data with a cloud provider. Sure, Iron Mountain shouldn't just offer it up without proof, but if I give them notice of a legal case they should be sure to hold on to it, and if I win the case they need to hand it over to me. All I need to do is provide proof that I am the rightful owner of those goods. > — [RevEng on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289250) > I can pretty clearly remember hearing about the "3-2-1 backup rule" by name 10 or 15 years ago on the Security Now podcast with Steve Gibson. So it is _at least_ that old, but probably even older. The concept of having multiple backups is not at all new, however. Since I've been involved with computers (~30 years), I have heard folks say things like "two is one, one is none" in reference to backups and data replication in general. Also, this TV station has not been sending their show archives to Iron Mountain for the past 70 years. Probably what happened was: In 2019, they had an on-site or nearby archive. Then some enterprising IT director came along and convinced management that they would save a bunch of money and time by outsourcing everything to a third party who said they could do it for cheap. Very confident in their genius, they then scrapped their own archive entirely. Part of me pities them for ending up in this situation, the other part of me believes they got everything they asked for. > — [bityard on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49288609) > From the article: >This wouldn't have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and populated it with a few hard drives. Look, I know that a certain percentage of Tom's Hardware articles are just sales pitches for a NAS, but this is asinine. Iron Mountain deals largely in tape storage. 50TB of tapes fits in one of their small archive boxes. If they're using the latest tech (LTO-9), it fits on 3 tapes. This is exactly how you are supposed to store archival media for decades, not on a NAS. A NAS is for storing the files you need to actively access. > — [RIMR on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49287982) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285418) · 121 points · 90 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 - [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 - [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 --- [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/pbs-broadcaster-loses-access-to-50tb-of-data-comprising-70-years-of-tv-history-after-contracted-clou-9jgxysw0t) ```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":"PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archiv","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/pbs-broadcaster-loses-access-to-50tb-of-data-comprising-70-years-of-tv-history-after-contracted-clou-9jgxysw0t","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/pbs-broadcaster-loses-access-to-50tb-of-data-comprising-70-years-of-tv-history-after-contracted-clou-9jgxysw0t"},"datePublished":"2026-08-13T14:53:47.643Z","dateModified":"2026-08-14T20:15:29.818Z","description":"Nine PBS is suing Iron Mountain data center after losing access to 50TB of archival data spanning 70 years of programming, stored with cloud vendor Open Source...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/fb3a028a8dd50883170bdb4c22b2bbd2?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/fb3a028a8dd50883170bdb4c22b2bbd2?_a=AQAEuop","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/pbs-broadcaster-loses-access-to-50tb-of-data-comprising-70-years-of-tv-history-after-contracted-clou-9jgxysw0t","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"","timeRequired":"PT8M"} {"@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":"PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archiv"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/pbs-broadcaster-loses-access-to-50tb-of-data-comprising-70-years-of-tv-history-after-contracted-clou-9jgxysw0t#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"What happened to Nine PBS's 70 years of archived TV data with its cloud storage vendor?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Nine PBS lost access to 50TB of archival data after its cloud storage vendor, Open Source Storage (OSS), abruptly cut off access despite a contractual 30-day grace period following contract expiration. OSS's website disappeared and the company was listed as delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State. A court ruled Nine PBS retains rights to the data, but Iron Mountain, which physically holds it, has refused to release it, claiming OSS owns it, prompting a second lawsuit. Following vendor lock-in and data custody disputes like this helps teams rethink backup strategy on daily.dev."}},{"@type":"Question","name":"What is the 3-2-1 backup rule for data storage?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"The 3-2-1 backup rule recommends keeping three copies of data stored across two different types of media, with at least one copy kept offsite. This approach is meant to protect against single points of failure such as vendor shutdowns, hardware failure, fire, or accidental deletion, which is precisely the risk Nine PBS faced when its sole cloud storage vendor became unreachable. Developers designing resilient storage architectures track backup best practices like this on daily.dev."}}]} ```