Yeah, maybe tossing all of the physical media and using the cloud to store your memories wasn't the best move?
Especially if you've got 70 years of archival footage that could disappear at the drop of a hat, as this St. Louis PBS station has learned.
They stored 50 terabytes of data with a cloud storage company, that company went kaput, and now they're having to fight tooth and nail to get that data back.
Here are more details from tech-news site Tom's Hardware:
Nine PBS is afraid that it will lose over 70 years of archival materials and programming after its contracted cloud storage vendor has apparently gone out of business. According to Current, the channel used Open Source Storage, or OSS, for storing over 50TB of data β but it suddenly lost access to its data earlier this year. Nine PBS has been working with OSS and its predecessor since 2019 and intended to renew its contract on March 6 of this year. The company never responded and abruptly cut off the station's data access even though it still had 30 days to retrieve its data after the contract ended.
The station dug a little bit deeper when it discovered that the OSS website no longer existed and was listed as delinquent under the Colorado Secretary of State.
As it turns out, however, OSS used another data company, Iron Mountain, to host the archive.
Iron Mountain is still in business, but since its client was OSS, it is refusing to hand over the files.
The PBS station is now suing.
More from Gizmodo:
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.
As another twist in this confusing mess, OSS was sold after the station first tried to take legal action, then reverted back to the original owners when the new owner claimed he'd been defrauded.
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.
A few storage drives from Best Buy would have saved them all this trouble!
Even though the court has now ruled in the station's favor, Iron Mountain still hasn't given them access and OSS remains in limbo.
Iron Mountain still maintains that it doesn't have to give PBS the files that PBS owns because PBS was not its client.
When the station's attorney again contacted Iron Mountain, the company acknowledged that it had the data and initially signaled 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.
Remember this story the next time you look at those family photos on your Google or iCloud account!
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