What happens when seven decades of television history suddenly become inaccessible because a cloud storage company disappears? That is the nightmare now facing Nine PBS, which has reportedly lost access to more than 50TB of archival material spanning 70 years after its storage provider, Open Source Storage, went out of business. The archive includes programs, videos, photographs, and other pieces of St. Louis history, leaving the public broadcaster scrambling to recover data that still physically exists but remains locked away. Now, a legal battle involving data-center giant Iron Mountain could determine whether Nine PBS gets its irreplaceable archive back — or risks losing a priceless piece of its history.
A sudden digital blackout
For more than five years, St. Louis public broadcaster Nine PBS trusted Open Source Storage (OSS) to hold its digital treasure trove. The partnership stretched back to 2019, and the station planned to renew its agreement on March 6. Then came the sudden silence. OSS failed to respond to contract communications and abruptly severed the station’s access to its files—even though the agreement guaranteed a 30-day grace period to retrieve stored media after contract termination.
Investigating the blackout, Nine PBS discovered that the vendor’s website had vanished completely, and the Colorado Secretary of State listed the business as delinquent. What began as a routine service delay quickly escalated into an emergency attempt to recover 50 terabytes of local television history.
Phantom partners and fraud claims
Desperate to secure its files, Nine PBS filed a lawsuit against OSS and its leadership. The litigation was briefly paused when an individual named James Tramel contacted the station, claiming to be a “managing partner of the group that officially acquired” the storage company.
Communications continued for a month before ending abruptly with an automated email stating Tramel was no longer affiliated with OSS. When the station finally reached him directly, Tramel claimed he had “been defrauded” into purchasing the cloud business and that operational control had reverted to its founders.
Left with no other alternative, Nine PBS pushed forward with legal action. A court eventually ruled in favor of the station, declaring that Nine PBS held full legal rights to its stored data and ordering OSS to “facilitate its transfer to a new vendor.”
Trapped in data center limbo
Winning in court proved to be only half the battle. Because OSS hosted its infrastructure through third-party data center giant Iron Mountain, Nine PBS had to direct its efforts toward the physical servers holding the drives.
Iron Mountain initially acknowledged holding the station’s archives and conditionally agreed to release them. However, the data center provider quickly backtracked, taking the position that OSS legally owned the hardware and stored data. Trapped between a delinquent vendor and a hesitant data center worried about liability, Nine PBS filed a separate suit against Iron Mountain to prevent the physical servers from being wiped or destroyed.
“Seventy years of our organization’s history,” emphasized Leah Freeman, Nine PBS Vice President and Chief Communications Officer, highlighting the immense stakes behind the legal battle.
The high cost of missing backups
The ordeal highlights a critical vulnerability in modern digital preservation. While cloud storage promises reliability, relying on a single offsite vendor without maintaining local, redundant copies creates an extreme point of failure. Industry best practices recommend the standard 3-2-1 backup strategy: keeping three separate copies of data across two different media types, with one stored offsite.
For Nine PBS, securing a direct court order compelling Iron Mountain to hand over the drives represents the clearest legal path to safety. Until then, seven decades of irreplaceable public television history remain frozen on offline servers, waiting for the legal system to pull them back from the brink of erasure.
Source:
Tom’s Hardware