pricelesslambo
New member
Nine PBS in St. Louis has more than 70 years of its own programming, over 50 terabytes of it, sitting inside an Iron Mountain facility in Denver that it cannot get into. The cloud storage vendor, Open Source Storage, cut access around the annual contract expiry in early March and then simply evaporated. Website down, company in delinquent status, nobody answering. The contract had the usual 30 day retrieval window, which is worth exactly nothing when there is no one left to serve notice on. Iron Mountain refused to release anything, arguing the racks and services belonged to its client rather than to the station.
A Denver judge ruled this week that Nine PBS owns the material and is entitled to recover it. The station now has 30 days to find someone qualified, ideally an ex-employee of the dead vendor, who can go into that facility and physically get the data out, and it has to cover the storage arrears the vendor stopped paying.
What is in there is not replaceable. Local journalism going back to the mid fifties, the 1993 flood coverage, the pandemic material. This is what a station's archive exists for.
I am posting it here because we spend a lot of time arguing over which 4K remaster came off which negative, and the real failure mode for broadcast history turns out to be administrative. A vendor stops paying its bills and seventy years of transfers becomes an asset in somebody else's collapse. Where does the second copy of your own library physically live?
A Denver judge ruled this week that Nine PBS owns the material and is entitled to recover it. The station now has 30 days to find someone qualified, ideally an ex-employee of the dead vendor, who can go into that facility and physically get the data out, and it has to cover the storage arrears the vendor stopped paying.
What is in there is not replaceable. Local journalism going back to the mid fifties, the 1993 flood coverage, the pandemic material. This is what a station's archive exists for.
I am posting it here because we spend a lot of time arguing over which 4K remaster came off which negative, and the real failure mode for broadcast history turns out to be administrative. A vendor stops paying its bills and seventy years of transfers becomes an asset in somebody else's collapse. Where does the second copy of your own library physically live?
