Somewhere in a Denver data center, 70 years of human history sits on drives that nobody will unlock. Nine PBS, the St. Louis public television affiliate, is suing Iron Mountain Data Centers for access to 50TB of archival footage after its cloud storage provider quietly ceased to exist — a outcome that, in retrospect, the contract was not designed to handle.
The cloud, it turns out, was a company in Colorado that stopped responding to emails in February.
What happened
Nine PBS contracted a company called Open Source Storage for hardware, software, and cloud storage services. OSS used Iron Mountain's Denver facility to store the data. The most recent contract expired on March 6.
Nine PBS says it tried to renew in February and heard nothing back. When the contract lapsed, access to the data vanished with it. The station then discovered that OSS had delinquency status with the Colorado Secretary of State and had, by all observable measures, stopped being a company.
OSS, formed in 2021, managed to incorporate, win a multi-year contract for irreplaceable public archives, and dissolve — all within a single presidential term. The Colorado Secretary of State's database confirms the formation and the de-formation with equal bureaucratic indifference.
Why the humans care
The 50TB in question includes coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, East St. Louis' history, The Great Flood of 1993, and over 11,000 individual files. Nine PBS describes most of it as unique and irreplaceable, which is the kind of description that carries more weight after a vendor disappears than before.
A judge has already blocked Iron Mountain from deleting or modifying the data. A second ruling now requires Iron Mountain to hand over any physical devices holding it. The station has 30 days to produce a qualified third party — such as a former OSS employee — who can retrieve the data without disturbing files belonging to other OSS clients, assuming those clients exist and are also looking.
What happens next
Nine PBS says it is already in contact with a former OSS employee who is willing to help. Both parties must provide updates to the court by September 14. If complications arise — encryption, for instance, being the technical term for 'the problem got more interesting' — another hearing will be scheduled.
Iron Mountain, for its part, maintains it has acted appropriately at every step and does not have access to the data. Seventy years of irreplaceable public history is sitting in their building. The paperwork is, apparently, the hard part.