PBS station sues Iron Mountain to recover 50TB archive stranded by defunct vendor

Nine PBS, the St. Louis public television station, filed suit on July 28 in Denver District Court seeking to recover more than 50 terabytes of archival material — roughly 70 years of broadcast history, including footage on the 1993 Mississippi and Missouri river floods, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the history of East St. Louis. The station currently cannot reach any of it.

The lock-out stems from a broken vendor chain rather than a hack. Nine PBS never contracted with Iron Mountain directly; it used a cloud-storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), which in turn parked the data in an Iron Mountain data center in Denver. When OSS went defunct and cut off access earlier this year, Iron Mountain declined to release the archive, arguing that OSS — not the station — owned the physical servers holding the data. The result is that Nine PBS’s own irreplaceable content is effectively hostage to a contract it was never party to.

The case is a textbook third-party custody failure: a single intermediary in the storage chain, no independent copy or contractual escrow, and no direct legal relationship between the data’s owner and the facility physically holding it. A judge, Eric Elliff, has since ordered Iron Mountain to cooperate with the station’s retrieval efforts, but the dispute is a pointed warning to any organization entrusting archives to layered storage vendors without a clear right to their own bits.