The Cloud's Fragility: St. Louis PBS Fights to Recover 70-Year Archive

A St. Louis PBS station is fighting to recover seven decades of cultural artifacts after its cloud storage provider collapsed, as Engadget first reported. According to reporting from The Denver Post, Nine PBS sued data center provider Iron Mountain in July to regain access to an archive containing photos, videos, and TV shows central to the history of St. Louis.

Engadget reports that the conflict began in March when the station's cloud vendor, Open Source Storage (OSS), terminated its contract and immediately cut off access to the data, denying the station a 30-day retrieval window. While the station later confirmed the archive was safe through a former owner of OSS, Iron Mountain—the company that physically hosted the data for OSS—refused to release the files. The lawsuit alleges that Iron Mountain cited its contractual obligations to the now-defunct OSS as the reason for withholding the data from Nine PBS.

In a statement to Engadget, an Iron Mountain spokesperson claimed the company acted responsibly to safeguard data and has been transparent about the fact that it does not have access to the station's data.

As reported by Current, a judge ruled this week that Iron Mountain must cooperate to help Nine PBS retrieve the materials. The court further required the station to hire a third-party vendor to facilitate the recovery to ensure other OSS clients' data remains unharmed. Leah Freeman, VP and CCO of Nine PBS, told Current that the station appreciates the court's decision to establish a path toward recovering materials the court confirmed Nine PBS rightfully owns.