And they had zero notice?
This looks like this is isolated to KETC’s locally produced shows for Missouri. They appear to be a smaller affiliate and they don’t make a ton of stuff that contributes to national and international broadcasts.
Since they have a smaller audience I imagine it’s going to be harder for KETC to find community-created backups of their stuff.
I also imagine that if Missouri gave more of a shit about public broadcasting, this affiliate would be operating with better funded / more experienced IT staff. These little affiliates really rely on a lot of volunteers and green IT folks who do the work for the experience.
Piracy is media preservation
I plead the fifth on that. But how come no backup on this. I am pretty sure they could got at least 50 people to get 1 tb hard drives so their data wouldn’t go this route. And probably more since PBS shaped whole generations of kids and adults into better people.
15x8TB drives gives you about 72TB in raidz2, for about £4k in disks, add a server for say £2k
So by not spending £6k they lost everything, they spent $19million on IT in 2025
Someone fucked up
Only if you’re OK with popularity surviving titles so that our media history becomes Thanos and Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.
Oh sweet child you have a rather myopic view of the weird shit pirates find and their willingness to data hoard.
I once put a ton of effort into tracking down episodes and information of a random Spanish Telanovella I caught on the Spanish channel once. Including recording and digitizing episodes.
I don’t even speak Spanish at all at the time, the show just seemed interesting.
I’ve lso converted a bunch of old Zines from a UK school to PDF because a musician I like was involved and the only copies were behind some weird paywall magazine site. Bunch of print screens and a script to crop double pages to single pages then merge them together.
Maybe I should try putting them somewhere like archive.org.
"What do you mean I should* remove data?? I might need this! " - definitely not me
Lololol! I forgot to /s. I’ve been a pirate all my life, son.
Wat… The lone seeder is elevated to mythical status in torrent culture. People take great lengths to preserve old content - whether that’s by seedboxing, ripping physical content, or even the more backend stuff like trackers who have entire systems devoted to “reseed requests”.
The private tracker I use have random stuff like reality shows for Norway television, all the Olympics transmissions, and BlueRay rips of movies from the 30’s. There’s also the popular stuff, but you would be amazed by the random stuff people upload.
I know, I was joking. I’ve been a pirate since getting my first box of floppies for my trs-80. I got bit by young people being very literal in reading my comment.
We’re not young people, your original comment is just wrong and makes no sense. Or tells us what YOU preserve.
According to the article, the data is not clearly lost. It’s that their provider, OSS, had a subcontract with Iron Mountain to host the data storage. When OSS abruptly went defunct, PBS had no direct legal path to access the data in Iron Mountain, and no assurance Iron Mountain would preserve it. It filed the lawsuit to make sure the data was preserved and affirm a legal basis to recover the data.
So the headline’s use of “loses access” is accurate but a little misleading. That said, it is a great argument for reliable data preservation.
also why you should have local and remote backups both.
Gotta follow the 3-2-1 rule
Well, yes, but consider that others using the OSS service may not have the resources of PBS to file suit and litigate the issue, and they may well lose their data forever.
The whole company is sketchy
https://web.archive.org/web/20250318131517/https://www.osstorage.com/cloudPricing
There is nothing open source, their address is the iron mountain denver datacenter address
That page looks like it was directly ripped from https://wasabi.com/pricing, including the “Ball appliance” which appears to be a Wasabi-only product. This reeks of “I know a guy who does storage” and it’s just a few open source products bolted to another storage API with upcharging and a corporate website
Good argument to not use the service.
Iron Mountain is aware of the situation so ideally they’ve flagged it to avoid the bad press of deleting it.
I’ll store PBS’s content on my Plex server if they want. I’m sure I’ve got 50Tb free
Redundancy would have made this a non issue. Even just local cold storage.
50 TB isn’t even that much space, certainly not for a broadcaster. No reason not to have a local copy. 50 PB, I could see a small PBS affiliate not having the resources to manage locally, but you can put 50 TB in consumer-grade NAS.
That’s less storage than my Plex storage. PBS could and should definitely do better.
More specifically, this PBS affiliate (Nine PBS St Louis). It wasn’t PBS proper. This only impacted local programming archives. But that’s still a loss for the local community.
PBS likely does much better than this. Heck, a lot of their stuff is backed up in the Library of Congress.
That’s fair. The point still stands that they should do better.
You can put this on 2 HDDs nowadays. This is pathetic.
50T isn’t even that much data anymore. You’re talking about maybe $2k in hard drives.
Refurbished Exos X22 drives with 24GB Capacity cost around 650€ these days, those 2k are the high end even nowadays.
Refurbished
If you’re a multi-billion dollar broadcast parent company doing long term storage for a 70-year archive catalog, you can spring for new. Maybe even go Big Fancy and get some RAID drives and tape backups, for extra redundancy.
In the pre-AI days maybe, today 50TB is expensive due to increasing prices of all computer gear.
today 50TB is expensive
I don’t believe you can go back more than five years and find per-TB rates under the current rate. Ten years is straight out. Twenty years is laughable.
Meanwhile, PBS has an annual operating budget of around $340M. They can afford to manage their own data, at the scale of tens of terrabytes. And I guarantee you that whatever they’re paying Iron Mountain to host the data is multiples the cost of self-hosting.
The cloud is just somebody else’s computer.
Hehe. Was just about to post this. Word for word
Someone just tell me that there are backups of most of this properly archived somewhere. Just tell me that, I’m not asking if it’s true, I just need someone to say that.
The data is all there, the vendor they were using to manage the storage just went OOB, and they’re not yet being allowed to retrieve it from the vendor’s storage vendor, Iron Mountain:
The lawsuit filed in Denver District Court alleges that the station’s cloud-storage vendor, Open Source Storage, abruptly cut off access to Nine PBS’ data earlier this year without warning. It states OSS, which had a separate relationship with Iron Mountain to provide data storage, went “defunct,” leaving Nine PBS’ archives in a data center operated by Iron Mountain.
Open Source Storage
Anyone heard of this company before? Their name is impossible to search for!
Thanks. This is the latest archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20250328163113/https://www.osstorage.com/
End-to-Endless Digital Storage Solutions
Endless? lmao
Iron Mountain is obviously aware of the situation and probably doesn’t want the bad press of deleting it. PBS just needs the court order that makes them hand the data over. Because PBS isn’t iron mountains client, they can’t hand them the data without a court order.
Likely available on a torrent.
Does the local St. Louis affiliate produce anything that lots of people would want to seed? They look like a smaller affiliate compared to the WGBH and WNETs out there.
I imagine KETC is a really small shop that mostly broadcasts stuff others have made, plus hyper-local content that isn’t expensive to make.
I know Wikimedia is getting deserved shit for what they’re doing now, but allowing anyone to download the entire shebang means it’s far less likely it will be lost in the future.
If PBS wasn’t forced to make money they could have done the same with their content. The only reason they needed to control it was because they needed to sell it.
That’s some bullshit.
How fucking lazy do you have to be to use cloud storage?
I wonder if there’s something that can be done. Sure the company may be out of business, but their hard drives somewhere that still has the data on it, right?
Reading the article explains the article.
Iron Mountain says the data is currently safe, but that OSS owns the hardware that contains the data so they cannot hand it over. The lawsuit is for an injunction to prevent deletion and retrieve their data.
The data is there. Seems to company was just a middle man business between them and Iron Mountain, which I am pretty sure is one of those “pretty big companies a lot of people don’t know about.”
For how long?
Investors will liquidate.
In theory yes
