One day in March, the cloud drive belonging to a PBS station in St. Louis suddenly stopped opening. It wasn't an accident or an outage—the provider had simply cut off access, with no industry-standard 30-day grace period, just like that. Inside that drive sat seventy years of Nine PBS's archives: TV programs, films, photographs—part of the city of St. Louis's collective memory.
The trouble started when Open Source Storage (OSS), the company providing the cloud service, decided not to renew its contract. In theory, clients should get a month to migrate their data out, but OSS cut off access immediately. Nine PBS could only reach out to OSS's newly appointed head to confirm in April that the files were, in fact, still sitting safely on the drives. Then that person left the company, and the trail went cold again.
The party actually holding the data was Iron Mountain, the data center company that handled physical storage on OSS's behalf. But Iron Mountain's contract was with OSS, not Nine PBS—which meant that, legally speaking, the television station had no direct right to retrieve files that were rightfully its own. In July, Nine PBS took the matter to court. They weren't seeking damages—just the return of what already belonged to them.
Iron Mountain's position is that it had been cooperative all along. A company spokesperson told Engadget: "Iron Mountain has taken appropriate and responsible action at every step to protect customer data and honor our contractual commitments to OSS... We do not have access rights to their data, and we continue to assist in resolving this issue." In other words: yes, the data is here, but the contract has someone else's name on it, so our hands are tied.
At a hearing this past Wednesday, a judge ordered Iron Mountain to cooperate as fully as possible in helping Nine PBS retrieve its data, while also requiring the television station to hire a third-party vendor to extract the files from Iron Mountain's data center—without disturbing any other OSS clients' data in the process. The judge noted that another hearing could be scheduled if the process turns out to be more complicated than expected. Leah Freeman, Nine PBS's Vice President and Chief Content Officer, told Current: "We appreciate that the court has made a thoughtful ruling that establishes a path to retrieve the files, and confirms that ownership of these files has always belonged to Nine PBS."
There were no hackers involved in this case, no natural disasters—just a contractual chain that snapped somewhere in the middle: a client signs with Company A, Company A outsources to Company B, then A goes under or changes hands, and suddenly the client's own data is trapped with B, out of reach. This is exactly the scenario behind the often-cited "3-2-1 backup rule"—three copies of data, on two different types of media, with one stored offsite. The lesson here: your cloud provider itself might be exactly the kind of risk you need a backup plan for.
