PBS Sues Data Center To Reclaim 50TB Of TV History Spanning 70 Years
While Iron Mountain may not immediately sound sympathetic in this story, there is at least a reason why a court order was needed here. The main and very valid concern on Iron Mountain's part is that Nine PBS' data may have been lumped together with other former Open Source Storage clients, and the secure storage firm wants to honor OSS' contractual obligations to those clients.
Keep in mind that Iron Mountain is one of the largest enterprise storage providers in the world, known to operate on an international scale with over 1500 storage facilities established since the company's founding in 1951. So even though Nine PBS has been legally rewarded its data, it may take some time before it actually gets the data back if it really is mixed in with other OSS customer data. The court has ordered updates from both Nine PBS and Iron Mountain on the recovery process by September 14th, one month from now.
In most coverage of Nine PBS' plight (first reported by Current), critics correctly note that Nine PBS would not be in this situation had it maintained on-site local backups. While this is true, it's not hard to see why a public broadcasting company would embrace the relative value and ease of cloud storage. Furthermore, Nine PBS had a plan in place and was ready to collect its data before its contract with Open Source Storage ended, but the broadcaster was apparently effectively ghosted as the hosting provider shut down.
Thankfully, that data seems to be safe in Iron Mountain's hands, and should now be recoverable with the help of an unnamed former Open Source Storage employee. It's unfortunate that the historic Nine PBS station has fallen victim to such major data loss, but at least the backups exist in this case and weren't, say, stolen or destroyed. If you don't also have off-site backups, you may want to consider finding a place to store your own precious, irreplaceable data, because you never know what the future may bring.
