Nine PBS lost access to 50TB of archives when its data center vanished

[Daniel Sims]

Facepalm: Entrusting critical systems to external tech companies can be dangerous because they might suddenly shut down or come under new management. Nine PBS is currently learning this lesson, along with the importance of maintaining additional backups, amid court proceedings against a data center with a murky ownership history.

Nine PBS in St. Louis is suing the owner of a Denver-based data center after spending much of this year attempting to regain access to more than 50TB of its archival data. The data center became defunct and changed ownership multiple times under circumstances that remain unclear.

According to public media outlet Current, the station began entrusting the massive trove of data, which includes 70 years of broadcast history, to a data center described in court filings only as "OSS predecessor," in 2019. Nine PBS renewed its contract each year, even after its partner changed its name to Open Source Storage, until February 2026, when the data center stopped responding.

Despite the contract's 30-day grace period, OSS abruptly cut off access to the archive on March 6 without offering the station an opportunity to renew. Upon investigation, Nine PBS discovered that the data center was delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State and its website had shut down. It was only later that the station discovered that another company, Iron Mountain, owned OSS.

The runaround became more confusing from there. After demanding that Iron Mountain preserve and return the archive, Nine PBS sued OSS and its purported president, Charles Wells, in the St. Louis Circuit Court on April 16, but paused proceedings after James Tramel, a "managing partner" of an unnamed group that acquired OSS, confirmed that the data was safe.

Even stranger, Nine PBS lost contact with Tramel after about a month and eventually received an automatic email stating that he was no longer connected to OSS. He later claimed that he had been "defrauded" into buying OSS, after which multiple prior owners assumed control of the data center. Nine PBS later resumed the lawsuit after Iron Mountain initially pledged to turn over the station's archives but later changed its mind, with hearings set to begin this week.

While the circumstances behind OSS's disappearance and revolving door of owners remain mysterious, Nine PBS's struggles serve as another reminder of the importance of redundant backups. South Korea's government discovered this late last year after losing 858TB in a data center fire.

Permalink to story:

Nine PBS lost access to 50TB of archives when its data center vanished

 

[Honest Abe]

50TB isn't much data at all, especially for a large company. Even as a drone hobbyist, I have over 100TB of video data sitting on a server in a closet in my home, and I have all of it backed up with BackBlaze for just $99/year.

 

[Neatfeatguy]

I've got 5TB of movies/shows backed up across 4 different locations.

How any large company doesn't have their own data on site, backed up several times - especially considering for Nine PBS that's only 40TB, that's their own damn fault.

I have no sympathy for anyone or company that does not store and backup their own data and solely rely on cloud.

 

[DrSuess]

This why it is important not to rely solely on a third party Datacenter. We have both in house backups and offsite backups of anything critical. The cloud vendor "Amazon" is for quick access to data, if Amazon goes down it won't affect business as we have offline access to the data (just make take longer to access it).

 

[Theinsanegamer]

The cloud shouldn't be your only workspace. We've been crying this for years and nobody listens until everything goes belly up.

 

[Axeia]

Having a local backup wouldn't have cost much (20TB HDDs go for less than $700 - tape storage for much less still).
Expensive mistake to make, betcha their IT department gets some well deserved yelling at.

 

[Aolish]

The cloud shouldn't be your only workspace. We've been crying this for years and nobody listens until everything goes belly up.

To be honest, we all do that to some degree. It doesn't have to be the subject at hand that were talking about now. How many times have we heard from others or told others to check out that stomach, headache (or other health related issues) problem and they or we never do it till something horrible happens, like cancer gets discovered or a perforation forms within the stomach because the person didn't listen. Or how about that plumbing, roof, AC unit etc that needed fixing that someone told you about that we should have done but now we have a major leak problem causing mold now, or better yet, a lot of people have been complaining about how criminals are always let go free up to 15-20 times only for them to come back and do another heinous crime. I guess you know what I'm getting at, I could keep going on and on but you get the point lol, the fact of the matter is all of us have done this at one point or another when it comes to ignoring other peoples advice due to whatever reason.

 

[Win7user]

Any time you back up "your data" to SOMEONE ELSE'S SERVER, you get what you get. Backup your data on your "own server". (NASync DXP2800 G, as an example) PBS has the money to backup their own data. They own this.