TV Station in a Fight to Retrieve Its Archive After Cloud Company Went Bust

A local TV station is in a messy situation after the cloud company it was using to store 70 years’ worth of archival material vanished.

Gizmodo reports that Nine PBS in St. Louis had a rolling annual contract with Open Source Storage (OSS), a cloud storage provider, but when the station went to renew the deal earlier this year, OSS didn’t respond.

On the day the contract expired, Nine PBS suddenly lost access to its data without any warning. That’s when staff there realized that OSS’s website was inactive and the state of Colorado listed the company as delinquent.

The station lost access to 50 terabytes of archival materials, which included all of its footage of historical events that have taken place in St. Louis.

See You in Court

Nine PBS sued OSS but paused the lawsuit after it was contacted by a managing partner of a group that had acquired OSS’s assets and revealed that the station’s archive was being held at the Iron Mountain Data Center in Colorado.

After the managing partner stopped replying, Nine PBS contacted Iron Mountain, which initially suggested that it would return the data, until it reversed course and refused to do so because OSS owned “the physical services housing the data.”

So Nine PBS is now petitioning a court to order Iron Mountain to return the data. At a recent hearing, a judge ordered Iron Mountain to preserve the archive.

“We appreciate the Court’s thoughtful decision establishing a path forward to access and recover our archival materials, which the Court confirmed that Nine PBS rightfully owns,” Nine PBS Vice President and Chief Communications Officer Leah Freeman tells Gizmodo.

“These archives represent an important part of our region’s history, and we look forward to ensuring their preservation and protection through the Court-approved process.”

The lawsuit, filed in Denver District Court, alleges that OSS abruptly cut off access to the station’s data and that Iron Mountain is refusing to hand it over.

“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,” Freeman says in a statement to Current.

Image creditsHeader photo licensed via Depositphotos.