Nine PBS, a PBS station in St. Louis, Mo., must have access to data lost when its provider went out of business, a judge ruled this week. Nine PBS, a PBS station in St. Louis, Missouri, sued data center company Iron Mountain in July for access to a 70-year-old archive of cultural artifacts, THE Denver Post reported. The station took legal action after Iron Mountain allegedly refused to hand over data it hosted on behalf of Nine PBS’s now-defunct cloud service provider Open Source Storage (OSS).
Woozad has asked Nine PBS for comment on the decision. We will update this article if we receive a response.
The trapped archives include television shows, videos, photos and other digital cultural items related to St. Louis history, according to a copy of the lawsuit viewed by The Denver Post. In March, Nine PBS learned that Open Source Storage, its cloud storage provider, was not renewing its contract, but rather than giving the station 30 days to recover the archives, the company immediately cut off access. The station was then able to contact the new owner of Open Source Storage to confirm that the archives were indeed secure in April.
After the owner left the company, the station turned to Iron Mountain, which physically hosted the data for open source storage. At least so far, Iron Mountain has refused to turn over the data — since its contract is technically with OSS rather than Nine PBS, according to the lawsuit — prompting Nine PBS to file a lawsuit.
“Iron Mountain has acted appropriately and responsibly at every step to protect its customers’ data and honor its contractual commitments to OSS,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to Woozad. “Throughout this process, we have been transparent with Nine PBS about our role in this dispute, that we do not have access to their data, and we have made ongoing efforts to help them resolve the issue.”
At a hearing Wednesday, a judge ordered Iron Mountain to cooperate in every way with Nine PBS to recover the data. Current reports. The judge also ruled that the station must identify a third-party vendor that can help access data from Iron Mountain’s data center and ensure it does not harm other OSS customers’ data. If the data recovery process proves more complicated, the judge said another hearing would be scheduled. “We appreciate the Court’s thoughtful decision establishing a path forward to access and recover our archival materials, which the Court has confirmed are rightfully owned by Nine PBS,” said Leah Freeman, Vice President and Chief Compliance Officer of Nine PBS. Current.
While Nine PBS is now set to hopefully back up its digital archives, much of this drama could have been avoided with a more secure approach to data storage. The most common recommendation is to follow what’s called the “3-2-1 rule,” where you keep three copies of each file on two different media (like a physical hard drive and a cloud storage service), with one copy kept offsite. Following the 3-2-1 rule gives you backups if your cloud storage provider goes bankrupt or your physical drive dies, and means that a flood or fire that destroys a file will, barring a global catastrophe, leave at least one copy intact.
