Public television due to provider bankruptcy with 50 TB of archive footage

Nine PBS has lost access to its digital archives after the cloud storage company Open Source Storage (OSS) abruptly shut down. The station had been working with the provider since 2019 and was set to renew its contract in early March of this year. However, the company has not responded to requests and has cut off access to the data, even though the station was contractually required to have 30 days to download its files.

Further investigation revealed that the website of Open Source Storage (OSS) had simply disappeared, and the company was listed as inactive by local authorities. Since OSS used the services of the well-known Iron Mountain data center for physical storage of equipment, the station management contacted them directly with a request for data protection.

The plot didn't end there, however. The station initially filed a lawsuit against OSS, but temporarily froze it when a person came forward claiming to be the new owner of the company. After a month of communication, that contact also disappeared with an automated message stating that the person was no longer associated with the company. The individual later explained that he himself had been the victim of a scam and that ownership had been taken back by the original owners.

The court then ruled in favor of the Nine PBS television station and granted it full access to the data. Although the Iron Mountain data center initially agreed to hand over the files, it later changed its position. They claim that the official owner of the stored data is Open Source Storage (OSS), which is why they fear possible lawsuits if the data were handed over directly to the Nine PBS station. Therefore, the television station had no choice but to file a lawsuit against the data center.

This case clearly warns and encourages us to think about the reliability of relying completely on external cloud providers. Experts often emphasize the 3-2-1 backup rule, which assumes three copies of data on two different media and one location outside the company. It seems that the station did not have its own local backup, which is quite risky for such a large organization. Despite everything, hope remains, as the data is still physically present on the servers and has not been destroyed.