A local PBS station in St. Louis is learning the hard way why it’s important not to rely on the cloud alone and to keep multiple backups of your data.
Nine PBS filed a lawsuit last month against Denver-based Iron Mountain Data Centers in an attempt to recover more than 50 terabytes of archival material, according to the public media news outlet Current. The case had a hearing this week.
The lawsuit alleges that the station’s archives became trapped in legal limbo after its cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), abruptly cut off access to the data and apparently went defunct earlier this year.
OSS had its own agreement with Iron Mountain to house the archives at one of its data centers. But Iron Mountain has so far declined to return the materials because its customer was OSS, which owned “the physical services housing the data” within Iron Mountain, according to the complaint.
Nine PBS is now asking the court to make sure the company preserves the archive while the dispute gets sorted out. A judge granted temporary relief preventing Iron Mountain from deleting or overwriting the data.
“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 told Gizmodo in an emailed statement. “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 materials span more than 70 years and include the station’s coverage of East St. Louis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Great Flood of 1993.
How did this happen?
So, how did things get this messy?
In 2019, Nine PBS entered into an agreement with a company that would eventually become OSS to provide “hardware, software and cloud-storage services.” The station renewed the agreement annually.
When Nine PBS tried to schedule a meeting with OSS this February to discuss renewing its contract for another year, it never heard back.
Then on March 6, the date their contract was set to expire, Nine PBS abruptly lost access to the data. Despite the contract giving the station 30 days to retrieve its files “upon termination of services.”
When Nine PBS tried to figure out what was going on, it discovered that OSS’s website was no longer active and that the company had delinquent status with the Colorado Secretary of State.
Nine PBS eventually learned that OSS had been storing its data through Iron Mountain. On March 13, the station sent the data center company a letter asking it to preserve and return the archive and even offered to cover the costs. Iron Mountain initially neither confirmed nor denied that it had the materials.
Then things got even weirder.
So who owns what and where is it?
Nine PBS sued OSS in April, but the station later paused the case after James Tramel, who identified himself as a managing partner of a group that had acquired OSS’s assets, contacted Nine PBS and confirmed that its data was being housed at Iron Mountain’s Denver facility.
About a month later, Tramel stopped responding to the station too. An automatic reply from his email account said he was no longer affiliated with OSS. Nine PBS says Tramel later told the station by phone that he “had been defrauded” into purchasing the company and that it had reverted back to its previous owners.
Nine PBS eventually went back to court and the court ruled that the station owned the data.
But that still didn’t get Nine PBS its archive back.
When the station’s attorney again contacted Iron Mountain, the company acknowledged that it had the data and initially siginaled that it wanted to comply with Nine PBS’s request. But Iron Mountain later declined to turn it over, citing OSS’s ownership of the infrastructure housing the data.
Nine PBS said in its latest complaint that it “had no choice” but to file this lawsuit to get Iron Mountain to preserve and return the archive.
Iron Mountain did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
