Overview
- Nine PBS lost access to more than 50 terabytes of archives when its cloud contractor, Open Source Storage, went unresponsive and showed delinquent registration with state authorities.
- The station discovered the files were housed at an Iron Mountain data center and sent a written demand offering to pay reasonable preservation costs.
- Iron Mountain later confirmed it holds the material but declined to turn the files over, arguing OSS owns the physical services that house the data.
- A court has ruled Nine PBS owns the archives and issued temporary relief to prevent deletion or overwriting, and Nine PBS has filed a separate suit to force preservation and transfer of the files.
- The archive contains decades of local reporting including coverage of the Great Flood of 1993 and the COVID-19 pandemic, and the dispute underlines risks of single-vendor storage and the need for clearer contractual exit and backup practices.