Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • 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
  • 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?

    https://www.linkedin.com/company/osstorage/people/

    by thelastgallon
  • >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.

    by ApolloFortyNine
  • 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
  • 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)

    by Crosseye_Jack
  • It’s entirely possible that Iron Mountain will be happy to turnover the data but needs a court judgement to do so without incurring more legal exposure. The article says the system belongs to OSS. If this is something like a colo arrangement then probably that is the only reasonable position to take. They can’t just go crack open a customer’s server and pull data out of it for whoever asserts a claim on it.
    by jeremyjh
  • Free account, indefinitely, to whoever needs it to store this data … including the storage vendor.

    Just email…

    by rsync

Explore Birbla archives