Public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center after its cloud storage vendor goes out of business, losing over 70 years of archival materials and programming
A St. Louis PBS station bought cloud storage from a vendor that has now gone defunct and is now in a legal battle with its landlord for access to its own data
Nine PBS in St. Louis has filed a lawsuit against Iron Mountain Data Centers in an attempt to recover approximately 50 terabytes of archival materials spanning seven decades. The dispute arose when the station's contracted cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), suddenly went out of business, cutting off access to the data on the day its contract expired.
Iron Mountain claims it never had access to the data, stating that it only rents physical space to OSS and that providing the data center operator with the actual hardware would have breached its contracts and potentially exposed other clients' data.
A Denver judge ruled in favor of Nine PBS, establishing the station as the rightful owner of the materials and ordering Iron Mountain to cooperate in the retrieval process within 30 days. The materials in question include Nine PBS's coverage of significant events such as the history of East St. Louis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Great Flood of 1993, covering approximately 70 years of the organization's history.
The station is seeking assistance from a third-party vendor, potentially a former OSS employee, to access and retrieve the data from Iron Mountain's facility.
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