Link SharePBS Almost Lost 70 Years worth of Archival Footage

PBS lost 50 terrabytes of data, over the span of 70 years.

St. Louis public broadcaster Nine PBS (KETC) lost access to 50 terabytes of invaluable archival footage, spanning seven decades, when its cloud vendor, Open Source Storage (OSS), suddenly shut down and went out of business.

These unique files, contained historical records of the 1993 Great Flood, East St. Louis history, and local COVID-19 pandemic coverage, are trapped on physical servers inside a Denver data center operated by Iron Mountain.

Because the data center's contract was technically with the defunct vendor rather than the station, Nine PBS found itself locked out of its own history, showcasing the dangerous vulnerabilities of modern cloud dependency.

To prevent the irreplaceable files from being permanently deleted or overwritten, Nine PBS filed a lawsuit against Iron Mountain in Denver District Court. Fortunately, a judge recently ruled in favor of the broadcaster, ordering Iron Mountain to cooperate and establish a pathway for data recovery with the help of a third-party expert. While this legal breakthrough offers a glimmer of hope for restoring the archive, the dispute serves as a cautionary tale for organizations that outsource their historical memories to external digital hosts without maintaining physical, localized backups.