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- Hacker News
- Loses "access to" the data. The data is still there, they're just waiting for a court order.by smallerize
- Why should they have to get a court order when the party in custody said they have the data? Unless they don't actually have the data and they're hiding behind the court.
- They should've kept the archives in their intern's car, like the State of Ohio did
https://www.newson6.com/story/5e3687772f69d76f6209d656/tape-...
by amiga386 - This good old quote comes to mind:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
— Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Cram a few 12 TB drives into that sucker and you’ve got all the storage you need for their whole 50 TB archive.
- This underscores the importance of the Internet Archive and people like Marion Stokes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes).by treetalker
- It's incredibly frustrating. The Internet Archive offers a Vault product, where you pay $2-3/GB one time for perpetual storage into the future of your collections, items, media, etc. This pricing was previously predicated on the cost decline curve of storage. It's gotten a bit more expensive due to the AI bubble inflating the cost of storage, but to your point, the Internet Archive is a superior custodian than some rando tier 2 cloud provider who won a contract from a non profit and will lose all of the data when they go bust.
(huge fan of Stokes as a fellow archivist, recommend the documentary on her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorder:_The_Marion_Stokes_Pr...)
by toomuchtodo - Don't trust Internet Archive as your only backup method though. There has been instances where they delete files without warning with the only explanation being that they don't meet TOSby ChrisRR
- There's an update about a hearing yesterday that has more details about the server setup and what the concerns on both sides were: https://current.org/2026/08/judge-sets-framework-for-nine-pb...
With the stuff about "corruption" and losing the data if the server is shut down, I wonder if part of the concern is about losing in-memory decryption keys.
by jack12 - > William Cravens, the attorney representing Iron Mountain, told the judge his client doesn’t know the format of Nine PBS’ materials that were stored by OSS. He expressed concern about whether Nine PBS’ archival material is lumped together with data from other OSS clients. Iron Mountain wants to avoid potentially corrupting the other data, Cravens added.
That's an entirely reasonable concern and explains why Iron Mountain wants OSS on the hook for fulfilling this order rather than trying to yolo it themselves.
by bpodgursky - It's funny to me that entire companies exist that have a fraction of storage that I personally have in a datacenter on flash let alone in total. 50 TiB is so little. It's like $7k annually on R2 and under a thousand bucks on S3 Glacier Deep Archive. I suppose it's just whoever knew the cousin of whoever at whatever position of authority but it's funny how just using deep glacier means he would have such insane margins over paying Iron Mountain.by arjie
- > 50 TiB is so little.
Still, it is 70 years of video from that PBS station.
by Tangurena2 - 50TiB is like $4k consumer SSDs in a shoebox at this point (not actually the recommended solution, but...). And that's massively inflated thanks to the AI boom.by gpm
- Your assuming it's all digital and can be stored on drives. It might be a large amount of physical film reel, magnetic tape, and tons of mixed legacy formatsby Melatonic
- The news article is really not clear about whether this was, relative to the company "OSS":
a) OSS is a colocation customer with its own hardware colocating it inside an Iron Mountain datacenter. In which OSS owned the bare metal and paid iron mountain for rack space and power.
or
b) OSS is a dedicated hardware customer of Iron Mountain running a service on bare metal owned by Iron Mountain, and has gone defunct, leaving behind a bunch of servers/storage arrays that would in normal circumstances get wiped/reprovisioned.
From the point of view of a customer of OSS (PBS), that's two extremely different things.
If it's scenario A, I don't see how PBS has any claim against Iron Mountain. Your typical datacenter colo host for bare metal hardware owned by a customer has no involvement whatsoever in the condition or operation of the data, operating system, filesystems, RAID arrays, ZFS, etc of how the customer has set up their environment. Nor any ability to do anything with it. A colocation host that hasn't been paid for its rack space and power will typically have clauses in its colo contracts allowing for seizure and sale of abandoned hardware after a certain period of time.
by walrus01 - 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?
- From the article it seems like Iron Mountain was doing the actual storage, and OSS was just acting as a middleman and taking some money off the top.by ndiddy
- It's not PBS, PBS - but an affiliate, Nine PBS (https://www.ninepbs.org/)
- >storing over 50TB of data
I thought this would be like the backups I've heard broadcasters have of every broadcast they've ever had (I've heard of people being able to request 20 year old news clips before).
But just 50TB of data? Duplicating that would have been cheap and trivial.
- Most broadcasters would consider their ultimate back up as the tape library/vault of their broadcast video tapes. Older stations will have a large collection of analog tapes. Most will only be digitized if someone requests it as capturing their entire library just to have digital files few people will ever want is an expense a station just isn't going to do for the lulz.by dylan604
- > But just 50TB of data? Duplicating that would have been cheap and trivial.
Seriously. I'm just a random nerd and I have a home server with 96TB of raw disk space divided in to two RAIDZ1 pools which cost me around $2500 to build five years ago and has required basically zero maintenance since then.
Hard drive prices are absolutely bonkers right now but even with that in mind if I were to build a modern version of this same machine I could do it for under $10k using brand new hardware and it'd have double the storage
by wolrah - I think for most of broadcasting history video was fairly low quality (according to today’s standards). So I am not totally surprised that this number is low.by berkeleyjunk
- > broadcasters have of every broadcast they've ever had
It depends - especially if you go back further than 20 years. The Wikipedia article for "Lost television broadcast" goes into detail:
by WalterGR - Yeah, we are talking about 3 20TB drives in a closet here.
I'm an independent photographer and I have my 20TB drives behind my monitor, backing up to backblaze with an offsite synology. Keeping this archive up does take time and money, but PBS should have the budget and IT deparment for this.
by thekid314 - Not PBS but an affiliate broadcaster and the data is not lost as in destroyed, but legally encumbered.
Full 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 archival materials, to ensure preservation
The channel’s attorney also reached out to Iron Mountain to inform the company of the pending case in Colorado; Iron Mountain finally admitted to holding the data. Iron Mountain initially agreed to turn over Nine PBS’ data, but it eventually backtracked and claimed that OSS owned the data it stored. Because of this, Nine PBS now has no choice but to sue Iron Mountain, too, to ensure the data is not deleted.
by adolph - > Iron Mountain initially agreed to turn over Nine PBS’ data, but it eventually backtracked and claimed that OSS owned the data it stored. Because of this, Nine PBS now has no choice but to sue Iron Mountain, too, to ensure the data is not deleted.
This does make sense. I'm guessing the first request some rep just went sure its you're data why not, but in reality, it's OSS's data, and you paid OSS to store it. It's also likely encrypted in someway.
TLDR still, is especially when it's a reasonable amount of data, just have more than 1 backup.
- Ok, it sucks, losing data always sucks, but what ever happened to the 3-2-1 backup rule? even if your off site backup provider goes tits up, your on site backup is still there.
If you don't want on site, a second off site provider, 50TB on backblaze would be an extra ~$350 per month (prob less if they were to commit to capacity instead of using their PAYG service)
- The backups (and servers) seem to still exist, but KETC's vendor is estranged with its own hosting / siting provider, Iron Mountain, which is a going concern.
IM seem to be holding KETC's data hostage, which is Not Cool.
by dredmorbius - From the article: It's not clear if the channel has backups of its data, but based on its determination, we suspect not. This is strange, though, especially for a major organization, as one can easily purchase a six-bay NAS on Amazon and populate it with the best HDDs. This also goes against the 3-2-1 backup rule, which says you should keep three copies of your files stored in two different mediums, with one of them running offsite. Hopefully Nine PBS will implement a better backup system once it regains access to its data.by basch
- I’m not sure this is the only copy of the data.
Sounds like they paid a company to digitise all their old tapes, and store the results. They possibly still have all the tapes (on site) and are just trying to avoid paying the costs to redigitise them.
But, it’s also quite likely they destroyed all original the tapes after digitisation, and this was the only copy.
by phire - It's worth noting that PBS affiliates are non-profits that have fairly constrained budgets, especially now that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been dissolved due to DOGE.
Non-profit IT has always seemed, to me at least, to be a land of compromises. There's rarely enough money, knowledge, or time to do things "the right way", so you have to do the best you can. If I could only choose one backup to have, it'd be remote on a provider like Iron Mountain. It would seem as if they are storing things on Iron Mountain through an intermediary company, who may or may not have actually paid the bill.
So, y'know, fraud's a possibility here.
by lenerdenator