PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct
https://current.org/2026/08/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over-blocked-access-to-archival-data/
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https://current.org/2026/08/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over-blocked-access-to-archival-data/
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Piracy is media preservation
I plead the fifth on that. But how come no backup on this. I am pretty sure they could got at least 50 people to get 1 tb hard drives so their data wouldn’t go this route. And probably more since PBS shaped whole generations of kids and adults into better people.
15x8TB drives gives you about 72TB in raidz2, for about £4k in disks, add a server for say £2k
So by not spending £6k they lost everything, they spent $19million on IT in 2025
Someone fucked up
A tiny PBS office in St Louis has a $19 million/year IT budget? I really doubt that.
I may have taken the whole PBS accounts, I’m not from the US
you forgot the $10K in labour to handle the backups
changes everything on that $19M budget!
That’s budget for the whole network, this happened to a small local station.
Heck its pbs. They should have publically archived it so anyone could keep a copy. At least the old stuff.
I’m having a vague memory of some (cartoon) creator or artist who was thankful to torrents because the show that was the cornerstone of their “portfolio” got delisted from a streaming platform’s catalog.
Is this true?
Iirc is “The Owl House”
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I found a bunch of obscure movies from the 1930s and 1940s when a friend asked for some. I’m still seeding them. And I do mean obscure, not like Citizen Kane or something that everyone knows.
Thank you for your service.
There’s a few 90s movie torrents I think I’m the only person left seeding. Things get forgotten about so fast.
The private tracker I use have random stuff like reality shows for Norway television, all the Olympics transmissions, and BlueRay rips of movies from the 30’s. There’s also the popular stuff, but you would be amazed by the random stuff people upload.
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We’re not young people, your original comment is just wrong and makes no sense. Or tells us what YOU preserve.
I don’t think he understands what a joke is
“All these dumb kids don’t get my super great jokes!”
I’m not completely wrong, it’s a joke! Isn’t it funny how I got all of my facts incorrect? Upvotes, please!
You misspelled ignominious in your username.
I know, dude. It’s an inside joke with a friend, if you care.
Wat… The lone seeder is elevated to mythical status in torrent culture. People take great lengths to preserve old content - whether that’s by seedboxing, ripping physical content, or even the more backend stuff like trackers who have entire systems devoted to “reseed requests”.
Deleting a torrent is probably the most heartbreaking thing i can imagine. My most prized possession is a ratio 1.00 torrent from 2014 that was 0.00 until 2021.
Rechecking, it is now at 2.00 which makes me unreasonably happy
Edit for more happiness: A copy of Monkey Shines (1988) that took me about 14 months to download is now at a 2913 ratio (since February)
Lmao I just watched the trailer for Monkey Shines. Rest in peace George, you legend.
According to the article, the data is not clearly lost. It’s that their provider, OSS, had a subcontract with Iron Mountain to host the data storage. When OSS abruptly went defunct, PBS had no direct legal path to access the data in Iron Mountain, and no assurance Iron Mountain would preserve it. It filed the lawsuit to make sure the data was preserved and affirm a legal basis to recover the data.
So the headline’s use of “loses access” is accurate but a little misleading. That said, it is a great argument for reliable data preservation.
Iron Mountain is aware of the situation so ideally they’ve flagged it to avoid the bad press of deleting it.
Well, yes, but consider that others using the OSS service may not have the resources of PBS to file suit and litigate the issue, and they may well lose their data forever.
The whole company is sketchy
web.archive.org/web/…/cloudPricing
There is nothing open source, their address is the iron mountain denver datacenter address
That page looks like it was directly ripped from wasabi.com/pricing, including the “Ball appliance” which appears to be a Wasabi-only product. This reeks of “I know a guy who does storage” and it’s just a few open source products bolted to another storage API with upcharging and a corporate website
Good argument to not use the service.
also why you should have local and remote backups both.
Redundancy would have made this a non issue. Even just local cold storage.
50 TB isn’t even that much space, certainly not for a broadcaster. No reason not to have a local copy. 50 PB, I could see a small PBS affiliate not having the resources to manage locally, but you can put 50 TB in consumer-grade NAS.
That’s less storage than my Plex storage. PBS could and should definitely do better.
More specifically, this PBS affiliate (Nine PBS St Louis). It wasn’t PBS proper. This only impacted local programming archives. But that’s still a loss for the local community.
PBS likely does much better than this. Heck, a lot of their stuff is backed up in the Library of Congress.
Either way, like under $2000 would have bought them the storage necessary to keep these backups on-site. They still would’ve needed another backup solution for redundancy purposes, but this wouldn’t be the huge issue it seems to be now, where the data is sort of in limbo.
That’s fair. The point still stands that they should do better.
Agreed. Although sometimes these smaller affiliates don’t have super-seasoned IT talent. The jobs for the department heads at these organizations often make what an intern or college grad would make in the private sector at an unremarkable mid-size tech company.
You often get people making questionable decisions simply because they don’t have seasoned IT people in the building.
All in all, this was dumb, but it also feels like a story I’ve seen before. The nonprofit media isn’t funded, and the cracks are showing.
When I started at my last job, I was fresh out of college, only Best Buy Geek Squad experience, and I was the sole IT guy at the company. All “backups” were shadow copies and VM snapshots. Shadow copies are great for simple accidental deletions, and the VMs would work as a backup 90% of the time, but it was not a valid backup solution. When I left we had onsite backups to hard drives, cloud backup in Azure blob storage, and remote replication geographically distant.
It still could have been better, but it was something. Also, we worked on government contracts and stored confidential and ITAR controlled military and government drawings and data. It was one of those things that I’m absolutely shocked that in my 9+ years there that we never had a major breach or lost any data.
You can put this on 2 HDDs nowadays. This is pathetic.
50T isn’t even that much data anymore. You’re talking about maybe $2k in hard drives.
Refurbished Exos X22 drives with 24GB Capacity cost around 650€ these days, those 2k are the high end even nowadays.
If you’re a multi-billion dollar broadcast parent company doing long term storage for a 70-year archive catalog, you can spring for new. Maybe even go Big Fancy and get some RAID drives and tape backups, for extra redundancy.
In the pre-AI days maybe, today 50TB is expensive due to increasing prices of all computer gear.
I don’t believe you can go back more than five years and find per-TB rates under the current rate. Ten years is straight out. Twenty years is laughable.
Meanwhile, PBS has an annual operating budget of around $340M. They can afford to manage their own data, at the scale of tens of terrabytes. And I guarantee you that whatever they’re paying Iron Mountain to host the data is multiples the cost of self-hosting.
it sucks but they didn’t follow the basic 3-2-1 rule of back-ups (3 copies, 2 types of media, 1 off-site)
That’s smart, My last company did 4-3-2-1. When the servers went down all we had was 4 calling birds 3 French hens and 2 turtle doves.
was your last employer a flock of seagulls?
u said flock
I heard about them. They got the five golden rings award
Well, they got the 1 off-site bit…
but it wasn’t even a back-up when they no longer had the original files
And they had zero notice?
That’s kind of how bankruptcy works. You can’t give notice that you’re going to be bankrupt. The moment you’d give notice of bankruptcy, everything would collapse anyway as lenders call in debts and customers cancel orders that are now in jeopardy.
Other statuses that exist are examinership (an outside appointee trying to save the company by any means) and receivership (probably the closest to what you’d like - the company is entrusted to a third party to try to pay its debts before it is wound up, usually trying to determine which debts to pay for the greater good, and which ones to default on).
Someone just tell me that there are backups of most of this properly archived somewhere. Just tell me that, I’m not asking if it’s true, I just need someone to say that.
The data is all there, the vendor they were using to manage the storage just went OOB, and they’re not yet being allowed to retrieve it from the vendor’s storage vendor, Iron Mountain:
Anyone heard of this company before? Their name is impossible to search for!
www.datanyze.com/companies/…/344641299
Dead link - www.osstorage.com
Thanks. This is the latest archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20250328163113/https://www.osstorage.com/
Endless? lmao
Iron Mountain is obviously aware of the situation and probably doesn’t want the bad press of deleting it. PBS just needs the court order that makes them hand the data over. Because PBS isn’t iron mountains client, they can’t hand them the data without a court order.
Likely available on a torrent.
Does the local St. Louis affiliate produce anything that lots of people would want to seed? They look like a smaller affiliate compared to the WGBH and WNETs out there.
I imagine KETC is a really small shop that mostly broadcasts stuff others have made, plus hyper-local content that isn’t expensive to make.
The cloud is just somebody else’s computer.
Hehe. Was just about to post this. Word for word
Risk analysis in IT Management nowadays is spectacularly bad.
If you become dependent on a 3rd supplier then their survival as a company is now a risk for you. It doesn’t matter how good the reliability you have contracted with them - if they go under whatever penalities in the contract for failing to deliver said reliability will never be paid.
You might even be at risk of them simply chosing to close that division - small company signing a service supply contract with a big company: good luck getting a contract where the parent company (rather than whatever paper company they spun up for that business area) actually has to pay you stiff penalties if they fuck you over.
As soon as mission critical anything is outside your company, a lot of otherwise irrelevant things become operational risks for your company.
This is why you don’t put your mission critical anything on an external Cloud supplier.
You know, stuff like the only copy of 70 years of TV history that’s actually just 50TB and would’ve fit a bunch of Hard Disks or Backup tapes.
This is something I kept pointing out to management at my last company, but they were always so hellbent on putting everything in the cloud. Then construction across the street cut some fiber or something going to our building. When I told management that we had no Internet and I was sending everyone home, they lost their shit. I mollified them a bit by pointing out that at least some people would be able to work from home. I then waited until the meeting the next morning to point out that only 1 QA/support person and 1 dev had laptops (because of course management didn’t see any reason to spend the extra money for laptops over desktops). It was also nice to be able to make the CEO and VP to drive all the way home and back to get their wireless data pucks they used as their personal Internet connections.
My overwhelming joy at all the petty little ways I was able to rub their bad decisions in their faces was a big part of what made me actually start hunting for a new job rather than just thinking about it.
Yeah, even having learned to explain this shit in the IT Consultancy language of “supply contracts” and “mission critical”, it’s still not guaranteed that I’ll convince a manager to avoid or at least account for the higher exposure to outside risks when subcontracting certain things.
Nowadays, with 3 decades of experience in the Industry, I honestly think that the majority of managers, no matter how high in a company, are either incompetent as fuck or simply manage with as priority maximizing their next bonus in the full knowledge that they’re leaving traps for the next one to solve and if they do blow up during their own time, they’ll still personally end up better off by going for bonus-today-problem-tomorrow than refraining from doing so.
The Peter Principle states that a manager will get promoted to his level of incompetency, then get stuck there. As time goes on, more and more managers reach their level of incompetency, until the entire management level is populated by people who are bad at their jobs.
Say a guy is a great salesman, the best in the company, beats all his targets. He’s just great at it, and all his customers love him. So he gets promoted to sales manager, with a nice office, and a big raise.
But just because he’s a talented salesman, doesn’t mean he knows how to manage sales people. Also, the guy who replaced him isn’t pulling in near the revenue, so the department he’s managing is now WORSE than before he took over. He becomes just another mediocre manager, in over his head, and he never gets another promotion again.
Or maybe he moves up a few more levels, but eventually he hits the point that he can’t do well, and that’s where he remains, being mediocre. After a while, ALL the managers are people who were good at their old jobs, but mediocre at this one, and here they stay, until they are swept out in their 50s.
I think that there are roughly 4 causes:
I would say that nowadays in management the first one is a pretty small fraction of it (except maybe in the less prestigious and less paid low level management positions) because people are rarely “promoted from the ground floor” nowadays and hiring for more prestigious positions is very heavy on the impression people project, so most of the problem are numbers 2 and 3 plus a bit of number 4.
Number 4 is especially pernicious because it means that once an institution is managed at the top level by people who do not recognize the importance of certain skills in management (like caring about and understanding risk analysis) it tends to mainly hire people who are the same for other management positions and even for replacements for the top job - people who don’t think a certain skill or mindset is important for the job are not going to have as a hiring criteria that candidates have such skill or mindset.
Yeah I did risk analysis for 9 years and the job gradually devolved in useless box check-in with people checking nothing, until all of us were laid off and replaced by an AI and a few people in India checking the output. It’s all for show.
Data you only have one copy of is data you don’t mind losing.
Or can’t afford yo duplicate in this economy
This looks like this is isolated to KETC’s locally produced shows for Missouri. They appear to be a smaller affiliate and they don’t make a ton of stuff that contributes to national and international broadcasts.
Since they have a smaller audience I imagine it’s going to be harder for KETC to find community-created backups of their stuff.
I also imagine that if Missouri gave more of a shit about public broadcasting, this affiliate would be operating with better funded / more experienced IT staff. These little affiliates really rely on a lot of volunteers and green IT folks who do the work for the experience.
I do volunteer work for nonprofits. Its amazing that normal people think we are swimming in cash… newsflash, we are not.
The IT budget is nothing so alot of what i do is setup open source stuff to meet needs…think libreoffice erc.
External storage for large backups is not on the table. And no one wants the reaponsibilty of shuffling external backup drives to and from.
And IT staff is often a lot of young folks who are building their resume and make really dumb rookie decisions. I was once that rookie.
Jesus Christ, what happened to P2P? Just have the files in constant circulation through the world’s computers. And 50TB, while a lot, isn’t beyond the reach of a well-heeled private individual to host on a NAS.
50TB is not a lot, it’s actually a capacity that some homelabers and data hoarders have or surpass.
It’s a lot if you were trying to source the hardware with today’s process, but 5 years ago that would be nothing to an organisation.
It’s a 4-digit number, even today, to build a 50tb local backup box. Absolutely nothing to a company. They were simply lazy and didn’t do the bare minimum.
Or they were sold a bill of goods by a cloud vendor.
The first time I heard about cloud storage, I wondered why anyone would store their stuff with a third party, for reasons EXACTLY like this. This is the exact scenario I thought of.
And while we’re talking about this specific case, presumably all the other customers of that cloud storage company list all their stuff, too.
Using cloud is not the problem here and never has been an issue from a technical design standpoint, it’s having the data only with one cloud provider that allows this to happen.
The only customers of that cloud provider that lost their stuff are the customers that would have lost their stuff using any other method they’d implement, because the only way you can lose your data this way is through poor design.
Aw, that’s sad. I loved Mr. Rogers and Dragon Tales.
Fuck cloud storage.
They are still around. This specific incident happened to a local PBS broadcaster, and it is only the local programming that was lost. Still sad, though
Yeah, but relying on a shady outsourced cloud storage middleman provider was kind of a terrible decision
100% agree. I keep all my media in 3¼ disks.
I actually have a marble track that automatically syncs with my hard drive to back up all my data in a series of binary pits that either do or don’t contain a marble
You can blame the storage provider but ultimately it’s their fault. Anyone who takes archiving serious knows that you need at least 3 backups of your archive in different locations for cases like this.
They should have made better decisions, but if they paid a middleman to outsource their storage to third company and the middleman goes out of business without having any terms with the storage provider regarding the data rights of their clients, then that sounds like somebody committed fraud and should face consequences
50TB seems very little for 70 years worth of data … I have more than that it it didn’t even take me 4.
Video files only got big in the last decade or so. Lower resolutions are a lot smaller
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Wtf is going on down there. Why are these companies being so cagey… this is not a hard problem.
Hopefully they get access back and someone learns enough to at least apend a few grand on some cold storage tapes.
I know Wikimedia is getting deserved shit for what they’re doing now, but allowing anyone to download the entire shebang means it’s far less likely it will be lost in the future.
If PBS wasn’t forced to make money they could have done the same with their content. The only reason they needed to control it was because they needed to sell it.
50TB isn’t even that expensive on a HDD! Couple hundred to a thousand bucks! How much were they paying for that much storage?
No in house backups? Sad.
“But optical discs are an old technology, everyone uses SSDs! Tape drives are even older technology! We need to SSD everything! SSD good! Oh no, why is that external SSD I haven’t powered up for five years and kept important file on it for fast access suddenly died? It was supposed to be the optical CDs that flake off and oxidize in a year or two!”
Well, there are archival grade optical disks for exactly that purpose.
I’ll store PBS’s content on my Plex server if they want. I’m sure I’ve got 50Tb free
This is PBS St Louis. So get ready to store hundreds of hours of this:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOBToc54vT5C1tdWJuXBFF…
I like the music but you’re right, I probably won’t watch 50Tb of talkback tv
That’s some bullshit.
I wonder if there’s something that can be done. Sure the company may be out of business, but their hard drives somewhere that still has the data on it, right?
Reading the article explains the article.
Iron Mountain says the data is currently safe, but that OSS owns the hardware that contains the data so they cannot hand it over. The lawsuit is for an injunction to prevent deletion and retrieve their data.
In theory yes
For how long?
Investors will liquidate.
The data is there. Seems to company was just a middle man business between them and Iron Mountain, which I am pretty sure is one of those “pretty big companies a lot of people don’t know about.”
so invest in friggin local storage, wtf
How fucking lazy do you have to be to use cloud storage?
how fucking entitled do you have to be to assume your world view is the only view?