After its cloud storage provider vanished, St. Louis PBS affiliate Nine PBS is suing data center giant Iron Mountain to regain access to 50 terabytes of irreplaceable content dating back 70 years.
The case, filed in Denver District Court on July 28, reveals the station’s trove includes groundbreaking coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, historical recordings of East St. Louis’ past, and over 11,000 invaluable files. The court has already blocked Iron Mountain from deleting or tampering with this data.
In a recent hearing, a judge ordered Iron Mountain to hand over any devices holding the Nine PBS data, while also instructing the station to find a former Open Source Storage (OSS) employee within 30 days to help retrieve the files without compromising other clients’ data. The station is already in contact with such an individual but faces potential complications if encryption poses issues.
The lawsuit claims that most of the data is unique and irreplaceable, underscoring the severity of losing this historical archive. If further hearings are necessary due to technical challenges, updates will be required by September 14.
