Data you only have one copy of is data you don't mind losing.
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
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Or can't afford yo duplicate in this economy
The first time I heard about cloud storage, I wondered why anyone would store their stuff with a third party, for reasons EXACTLY like this. This is the exact scenario I thought of.
And while we're talking about this specific case, presumably all the other customers of that cloud storage company list all their stuff, too.
Using cloud is not the problem here and never has been an issue from a technical design standpoint, it's having the data only with one cloud provider that allows this to happen.
The only customers of that cloud provider that lost their stuff are the customers that would have lost their stuff using any other method they'd implement, because the only way you can lose your data this way is through poor design.
50TB isn't even that expensive on a HDD! Couple hundred to a thousand bucks! How much were they paying for that much storage?
Risk analysis in IT Management nowadays is spectacularly bad.
If you become dependent on a 3rd supplier then their survival as a company is now a risk for you. It doesn't matter how good the reliability you have contracted with them - if they go under whatever penalities in the contract for failing to deliver said reliability will never be paid.
You might even be at risk of them simply chosing to close that division - small company signing a service supply contract with a big company: good luck getting a contract where the parent company (rather than whatever paper company they spun up for that business area) actually has to pay you stiff penalties if they fuck you over.
As soon as mission critical anything is outside your company, a lot of otherwise irrelevant things become operational risks for your company.
This is why you don't put your mission critical anything on an external Cloud supplier.
You know, stuff like the only copy of 70 years of TV history that's actually just 50TB and would've fit a bunch of Hard Disks or Backup tapes.
This is something I kept pointing out to management at my last company, but they were always so hellbent on putting everything in the cloud. Then construction across the street cut some fiber or something going to our building. When I told management that we had no Internet and I was sending everyone home, they lost their shit. I mollified them a bit by pointing out that at least some people would be able to work from home. I then waited until the meeting the next morning to point out that only 1 QA/support person and 1 dev had laptops (because of course management didn't see any reason to spend the extra money for laptops over desktops). It was also nice to be able to make the CEO and VP to drive all the way home and back to get their wireless data pucks they used as their personal Internet connections.
My overwhelming joy at all the petty little ways I was able to rub their bad decisions in their faces was a big part of what made me actually start hunting for a new job rather than just thinking about it.
Yeah, even having learned to explain this shit in the IT Consultancy language of "supply contracts" and "mission critical", it's still not guaranteed that I'll convince a manager to avoid or at least account for the higher exposure to outside risks when subcontracting certain things.
Nowadays, with 3 decades of experience in the Industry, I honestly think that the majority of managers, no matter how high in a company, are either incompetent as fuck or simply manage with as priority maximizing their next bonus in the full knowledge that they're leaving traps for the next one to solve and if they do blow up during their own time, they'll still personally end up better off by going for bonus-today-problem-tomorrow than refraining from doing so.
The Peter Principle states that a manager will get promoted to his level of incompetency, then get stuck there. As time goes on, more and more managers reach their level of incompetency, until the entire management level is populated by people who are bad at their jobs.
Say a guy is a great salesman, the best in the company, beats all his targets. He's just great at it, and all his customers love him. So he gets promoted to sales manager, with a nice office, and a big raise.
But just because he's a talented salesman, doesn't mean he knows how to manage sales people. Also, the guy who replaced him isn't pulling in near the revenue, so the department he's managing is now WORSE than before he took over. He becomes just another mediocre manager, in over his head, and he never gets another promotion again.
Or maybe he moves up a few more levels, but eventually he hits the point that he can't do well, and that's where he remains, being mediocre. After a while, ALL the managers are people who were good at their old jobs, but mediocre at this one, and here they stay, until they are swept out in their 50s.
I think that there are roughly 4 causes:
- As you mentioned, people promoted all the way up to the first position they are truly incompetent at, i.e. the Peter Principle
- Nepotism and cronyism - people are getting the jobs because who they know (i.e. "the old boys network") or who their family are, not competence.
- People get the job because they're good at personal image management and social networking - they mingle with the right people and project the right impression with things like speaking in a firm confident manner about things they know nothing about - which are fine skills to have and even applicable to some of the job of management (at the mid and above management levels), just not enough for the rest of the job of management, and that part missing is in most management positions the biggest chunk (and includes the stuff for recognition of risks and accounting for them).
- Upper level managers hire people like themselves to work under them. This partly overlaps with number 2 but goes further. When said upper level management is incompetent because they got in due to one or more of the other 3 problems, they hire people the same profile as themselves even if not due to those reasons directly (a simple example: managers who look and behave posh because they attended a posh private school will tend to hire managers who look the same hence are likely to have attended such schools themselves - this isn't directly cronyism but ends up producing a similar effect as they're selecting people from their social domain even if they don't know them personally)
I would say that nowadays in management the first one is a pretty small fraction of it (except maybe in the less prestigious and less paid low level management positions) because people are rarely "promoted from the ground floor" nowadays and hiring for more prestigious positions is very heavy on the impression people project, so most of the problem are numbers 2 and 3 plus a bit of number 4.
Number 4 is especially pernicious because it means that once an institution is managed at the top level by people who do not recognize the importance of certain skills in management (like caring about and understanding risk analysis) it tends to mainly hire people who are the same for other management positions and even for replacements for the top job - people who don't think a certain skill or mindset is important for the job are not going to have as a hiring criteria that candidates have such skill or mindset.
Yeah I did risk analysis for 9 years and the job gradually devolved in useless box check-in with people checking nothing, until all of us were laid off and replaced by an AI and a few people in India checking the output. It's all for show.
50TB seems very little for 70 years worth of data ... I have more than that it it didn't even take me 4.
Video files only got big in the last decade or so. Lower resolutions are a lot smaller
Piracy is media preservation
I plead the fifth on that. But how come no backup on this. I am pretty sure they could got at least 50 people to get 1 tb hard drives so their data wouldn't go this route. And probably more since PBS shaped whole generations of kids and adults into better people.
15x8TB drives gives you about 72TB in raidz2, for about £4k in disks, add a server for say £2k
So by not spending £6k they lost everything, they spent $19million on IT in 2025
Someone fucked up
A tiny PBS office in St Louis has a $19 million/year IT budget? I really doubt that.
I may have taken the whole PBS accounts, I'm not from the US
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Heck its pbs. They should have publically archived it so anyone could keep a copy. At least the old stuff.
I'm having a vague memory of some (cartoon) creator or artist who was thankful to torrents because the show that was the cornerstone of their "portfolio" got delisted from a streaming platform's catalog.
Is this true?
Iirc is "The Owl House"
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No in house backups? Sad.
"But optical discs are an old technology, everyone uses SSDs! Tape drives are even older technology! We need to SSD everything! SSD good! Oh no, why is that external SSD I haven't powered up for five years and kept important file on it for fast access suddenly died? It was supposed to be the optical CDs that flake off and oxidize in a year or two!"
Well, there are archival grade optical disks for exactly that purpose.
According to the article, the data is not clearly lost. It's that their provider, OSS, had a subcontract with Iron Mountain to host the data storage. When OSS abruptly went defunct, PBS had no direct legal path to access the data in Iron Mountain, and no assurance Iron Mountain would preserve it. It filed the lawsuit to make sure the data was preserved and affirm a legal basis to recover the data.
So the headline's use of "loses access" is accurate but a little misleading. That said, it is a great argument for reliable data preservation.
Iron Mountain is aware of the situation so ideally they've flagged it to avoid the bad press of deleting it.
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it sucks but they didn't follow the basic 3-2-1 rule of back-ups (3 copies, 2 types of media, 1 off-site)
Well, they got the 1 off-site bit...
but it wasn't even a back-up when they no longer had the original files
That’s smart, My last company did 4-3-2-1. When the servers went down all we had was 4 calling birds 3 French hens and 2 turtle doves.
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Redundancy would have made this a non issue. Even just local cold storage.
50 TB isn't even that much space, certainly not for a broadcaster. No reason not to have a local copy. 50 PB, I could see a small PBS affiliate not having the resources to manage locally, but you can put 50 TB in consumer-grade NAS.
That's less storage than my Plex storage. PBS could and should definitely do better.
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Jesus Christ, what happened to P2P? Just have the files in constant circulation through the world's computers. And 50TB, while a lot, isn't beyond the reach of a well-heeled private individual to host on a NAS.
50TB is not a lot, it's actually a capacity that some homelabers and data hoarders have or surpass.
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read the article, you losers
Logo ✕ Programs/Content People Development System/Policy Tech Jobs Sponsored Posts Webinars Job Description Depot Copyright 2025. Current. All rights reserved. Logo
Rescission Layoffs AI and Pubmedia Rising Stars History of Public Broadcasting Timeline Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data By Francisco RodriguezAugust 11, 2026
By Billy Hathorn - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
Nine PBS in St. Louis filed a lawsuit against information management corporation Iron Mountain Data Centers July 28, seeking to recover over 50 terabytes of archival materials stored in one of the company’s Denver-based data centers.
The lawsuit filed in Denver District Court alleges that the station’s cloud-storage vendor, Open Source Storage, abruptly cut off access to Nine PBS’ data earlier this year without warning. It states OSS, which had a separate relationship with Iron Mountain to provide data storage, went “defunct,” leaving Nine PBS’ archives in a data center operated by Iron Mountain.
Iron Mountain has refused to return the materials to the station because its client, OSS, technically owned “the physical services housing the data” within Iron Mountain, according to the complaint.
The station requested temporary and preliminary relief that would prevent Iron Mountain from deleting, modifying or overwriting its materials in the suit. A district judge granted the motion and set a hearing for Wednesday.
In a statement to Current, Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman confirmed the station’s lawsuit against Iron Mountain and its dedication to retrieving the archival materials and programming, which she says span over “70 years of our organization’s history.”
“We are committed to ensuring we can recover and restore full access to this valuable content, which Nine PBS rightfully owns, as it holds significant historical importance for St. Louis.”
According to the lawsuit, the blocked materials include historical items such as Nine PBS’ coverage on the history of East St. Louis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Flood of 1993, which ravaged along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.
‘No choice but to file’ Nine PBS entered a relationship with a company described in the complaint as “OSS’ predecessor” in 2019. This unidentified vendor provided “hardware, software and cloud-storage services” for storing the public broadcaster’s archival materials and other data.
Nine PBS renewed its contracts with the data services vendor and subsequently OSS annually, the complaint states.
When Nine PBS attempted to schedule a meeting with OSS in February to discuss renewing for 2026, OSS didn’t respond or indicate “any intention not to renew the agreement.” The agreement was set to expire on March 6.
The contract provided 30 days for Nine PBS to retrieve its data from OSS’ storage “upon termination of services.” But on March 6, OSS cut off the station’s access without warning, according to the complaint. When Nine PBS attempted to contact OSS to sort out the problem, it discovered that OSS’ website was defunct and the company had delinquency status with the Colorado Secretary of State.
To ensure the station’s data remained secure, Nine PBS investigated further and discovered that OSS had a relationship with Iron Mountain, according to the complaint.
Nine PBS sent a demand letter March 13, demanding that Iron Mountain preserve and return its data and offering “to pay any reasonable costs associated with its demand.” Iron Mountain neither confirmed nor denied the data was in its possession, the lawsuit states.
Nine PBS filed a lawsuit against OSS and its “purported” president Charles Wells in the St. Louis Circuit Court April 16, the complaint states. The broadcaster later paused the litigation after James Tramel, a “managing partner of the group that officially acquired” OSS’ assets, confirmed that Nine PBS’ data was secure within Iron Mountain’s Denver data center.
After communicating with Nine PBS for about a month, Tramel stopped responding. Weeks later, an automatic reply email from his account stated that he was no longer affiliated with OSS. Tramel revealed in a subsequent phone call that he “had been defrauded” into purchasing OSS, according to the complaint. At this point, the company’s previous owners, including Wells, Ben Nicholson, and Justine Ririe, resumed control of OSS’ operations.
After Nine PBS attempted to contact OSS leadership without success, the station returned to the St. Louis Circuit Court and obtained a default judgment against OSS. The court’s ruling stated that the station both owned its data and had an “immediate right to possess the data,” according to the complaint. The judgment also ordered OSS to return the data to Nine PBS “and/or facilitate its transfer to a new vendor.”
An attorney representing Nine PBS contacted Iron Mountain about returning the data, and noted that “litigation was imminent in Colorado,” and the company admitted that it possessed the data, the complaint states. Iron Mountain initially indicated that it wanted to avoid litigation and comply with Nine PBS’ request, but later refused to do so, citing OSS’ ownership of the infrastructure that houses the data.
Nine PBS’ complaint states that, following multiple unsuccessful attempts to retrieve its digital property, it “had no choice but to file this lawsuit to force Iron Mountain to protect and ultimately provide” the data.
Iron Mountain did not respond to a request for comment.
Hopefully they get access back and someone learns enough to at least apend a few grand on some cold storage tapes.
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Someone just tell me that there are backups of most of this properly archived somewhere. Just tell me that, I'm not asking if it's true, I just need someone to say that.
The data is all there, the vendor they were using to manage the storage just went OOB, and they’re not yet being allowed to retrieve it from the vendor’s storage vendor, Iron Mountain:
The lawsuit filed in Denver District Court alleges that the station’s cloud-storage vendor, Open Source Storage, abruptly cut off access to Nine PBS’ data earlier this year without warning. It states OSS, which had a separate relationship with Iron Mountain to provide data storage, went “defunct,” leaving Nine PBS’ archives in a data center operated by Iron Mountain.
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This looks like this is isolated to KETC’s locally produced shows for Missouri. They appear to be a smaller affiliate and they don’t make a ton of stuff that contributes to national and international broadcasts.
Since they have a smaller audience I imagine it’s going to be harder for KETC to find community-created backups of their stuff.
I also imagine that if Missouri gave more of a shit about public broadcasting, this affiliate would be operating with better funded / more experienced IT staff. These little affiliates really rely on a lot of volunteers and green IT folks who do the work for the experience.
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Aw, that's sad. I loved Mr. Rogers and Dragon Tales.
Fuck cloud storage.
They are still around. This specific incident happened to a local PBS broadcaster, and it is only the local programming that was lost. Still sad, though
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