A recent court ruling mandates that Nine PBS, a public broadcasting service station based in St. Louis, Missouri, must be allowed access to its lost data following the bankruptcy of its cloud service provider. Nine PBS initiated legal proceedings against the data center firm Iron Mountain in July, seeking access to a collection of cultural artifacts spanning 70 years, as reported by local news outlets. The lawsuit came on the heels of Iron Mountain’s alleged refusal to return data held on behalf of Nine PBS’s former cloud service provider, Open Source Storage (OSS).
The valuable collection in question consists of television programs, videos, photographs, and various other digital cultural assets important to the history of St. Louis. According to the lawsuit documentation, Nine PBS discovered in March that OSS would not be renewing its service agreement. Instead of granting the station a 30-day notice to retrieve its data, OSS abruptly terminated access. Fortunately, Nine PBS was able to contact the new owner of OSS in April, who confirmed that the archive was indeed intact.
However, following the departure of OSS’s new owner, Nine PBS sought assistance from Iron Mountain, which had physically stored the data for OSS. Iron Mountain has thus far denied access to the data, citing its contractual obligations with OSS rather than Nine PBS, which led to the legal action from Nine PBS.
In a statement, an Iron Mountain representative asserted that the company has taken all appropriate measures to protect customer data and fulfill its contractual responsibilities to OSS. They maintained that they have been open with Nine PBS regarding their role in the situation and reiterated their lack of direct access to the data.
During a court hearing held on Wednesday, a judge ordered Iron Mountain to assist Nine PBS in recovering the data. The ruling stipulated that Nine PBS must designate a third-party service provider to retrieve the data from Iron Mountain’s facility without jeopardizing information belonging to other clients of OSS. Should the retrieval process prove more complex than anticipated, the judge indicated that a follow-up court session would be arranged. Leah Freeman, Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer of Nine PBS, expressed gratitude for the court’s decision, emphasizing that it established a clear path for accessing and recovering their archival materials, which the court affirmed Nine PBS rightfully owns.
As Nine PBS takes steps to recover its digital archive, this situation highlights the importance of implementing safer data storage strategies. Experts commonly recommend adhering to the “3-2-1 rule,” which entails maintaining three copies of each file on two different storage mediums (such as an external hard drive and a cloud service), ensuring that one copy is stored offsite. Complying with the 3-2-1 rule provides a safeguard against losing data due to a cloud service provider’s closure or physical storage failure, thus protecting against disasters like floods or fires that could compromise one copy while leaving others safe.
