Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain to rescue 70 years of locked archives

St. Louis station Nine PBS is suing storage giant Iron Mountain after a middleman vendor went broke, leaving 50 terabytes of historical archives trapped in a Denver data center.

According to a lawsuit filed in Denver District Court, Nine PBS backed up its digital footage using a vendor named Open Source Storage (OSS). OSS went defunct in March and abruptly cut off the station's access. Nine PBS secured a Missouri court ruling stating it owns the data, but Iron Mountain—which hosts OSS's infrastructure—refuses to release the files because OSS technically owns the physical servers. A judge granted temporary relief to stop Iron Mountain from deleting or overwriting the drives.

Why it matters: You might legally own your data, but if your cloud vendor goes belly-up, the data center hosting their hardware can still lock you out. When multi-tiered hosting contracts collapse, owning the bytes does not guarantee physical access to the drives housing them.

Know this: If you rely on a boutique cloud provider, verify whose facility actually holds your disks. Make sure your agreement includes direct extraction rights if your vendor vanishes overnight.

For now, 70 years of Midwest history hangs in limbo on a Denver server rack.