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If you don't want on site, a second off site provider, 50TB on backblaze would be an extra ~$350 per month (prob less if they were to commit to capacity instead of using their PAYG service)
I wasn't 100% sure, but the data backs this up[0]; the "3-2-1 backup rule" is a relatively modern concept, at least by that name. I also remember things like "have one backup in one place, another in another place" since before this mnemonic, but I feel like it's unfair to judge a 70+ years archive on something that just recently actually became a widespread mantra.
- [0] Interestingly, Ngram (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%5B3-2-1+backu...) says ~2010 while Trends (https://trends.google.com/explore?q=3-2-1%2520backup%2520rul...) says slow build up from ~2020, guess "everyday" language would sit somewhere around those two different truths.
I've heard variations of this all the way back to some 1990s vocational IT courses in the country I live, and it wasn't even technologically advanced at the time. It's hard to have any sympathy for someone who misses this concept in today's age.
Also, this TV station has not been sending their show archives to Iron Mountain for the past 70 years. Probably what happened was: In 2019, they had an on-site or nearby archive. Then some enterprising IT director came along and convinced management that they would save a bunch of money and time by outsourcing everything to a third party who said they could do it for cheap. Very confident in their genius, they then scrapped their own archive entirely.
Part of me pities them for ending up in this situation, the other part of me believes they got everything they asked for.
They signed up with them in 2019. Not long ago.
Even if it is a "new" concept, common sense isn't. Pretty much anyone who cares about their data will do the due diligence, and this is not something that requires technical chops. This has been a concern for well over 20 years!
It really sounds like some senior management trying to be cheap.
I mean, that 70+ year old archive must have been digitised at some point, unless Iron Mountain was storing the reel to reel tapes and/or film from the original recordings. So some "modernation" has been applied to it since its creation.
Now add in tons of other legacy formats and digitising becomes a pretty big cost for a public station.
Non-profit IT has always seemed, to me at least, to be a land of compromises. There's rarely enough money, knowledge, or time to do things "the right way", so you have to do the best you can. If I could only choose one backup to have, it'd be remote on a provider like Iron Mountain. It would seem as if they are storing things on Iron Mountain through an intermediary company, who may or may not have actually paid the bill.
So, y'know, fraud's a possibility here.
I wonder how they got the contract? Seems to be 4 people 'employed' at this company. Of which, one is retired, one is "Linkedin Member", one is a controller and the last one is a social media person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabelle-anderson-7aa250b5/
So, just the person to deposit checks and a social media person to get paid. Who exactly is left to work on storage infrastructure?
I thought this would be like the backups I've heard broadcasters have of every broadcast they've ever had (I've heard of people being able to request 20 year old news clips before).
But just 50TB of data? Duplicating that would have been cheap and trivial.
I'm an independent photographer and I have my 20TB drives behind my monitor, backing up to backblaze with an offsite synology. Keeping this archive up does take time and money, but PBS should have the budget and IT deparment for this.
Agreed, no doubt about it.
> There has been instances where they delete files without warning with the only explanation being that they don't meet TOS
What sort of content? All the content I've judged to be of public interest and uploaded to Internet Archive, is still online there today. But I'd understand that depending on the type of content, that might not be true for everythibng.
Someone dumping their Twitch stream or random Youtube content into the storage system will certainly have that content deleted and be banned if prior arrangements have not been made, for example. Don’t do that.
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/sq6wbq/please_...
(huge fan of Stokes as a fellow archivist, recommend the documentary on her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorder:_The_Marion_Stokes_Pr...)
Okay hang on now.. that strategy comes with its own risks. Risks that I imagine PBS was trying to avoid by using a third party that specializes in archival data storage. This is a silly takeaway.
Edit: I was too quick to comment. I think they are suggesting that the NAS should have been used in addition to the third party storage, which is actually a great takeaway.
10 years ago, this was a lot of data. It isn't anymore and it makes it that much more bizarre that they're having that much trouble getting it back. It would be less to just give them access and let them download it themselves and perhaps stick it somewhere else temporarily than to pay lawyers to deal with legal filings.
To put it in vaguely physical terms, what once was a university library is now a good solid bookshelf full of stuff. Legally wrangling over a huge library is one thing, but if it's just a bookshelf, metaphorically, let them come in for an hour and clean it out themselves rather than bringing in the law. Obviously not a perfect metaphor on data size, this is more about how lawsuits are more of a hassle then just giving it to them.
More like 20 years ago (sorry). 10 years ago this would have been slightly stretching, but not by much - 11x8TB raidz3. Shuckable drives would have cost $3300 (plus the chassis), and already out of the husk probably 1.5x more. So let's say $5500 total even back then. (I built my current array around the same time)
Funny, these days you could do it with 4 spindles (4x24TB raidz2) but with the rampant price inflation in storage, you're still looking at $4500.
A whopping 150GB!
I think they just put that stuff in so they could shill their affiliate marketing articles rather than out of any actual concern.
At that point, why wouldn't you pick a major cloud vendor? This feels like more of a governance failure.
Full headline: PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation
The channel’s attorney also reached out to Iron Mountain to inform the company of the pending case in Colorado; Iron Mountain finally admitted to holding the data. Iron Mountain initially agreed to turn over Nine PBS’ data, but it eventually backtracked and claimed that OSS owned the data it stored. Because of this, Nine PBS now has no choice but to sue Iron Mountain, too, to ensure the data is not deleted.
This does make sense. I'm guessing the first request some rep just went sure its you're data why not, but in reality, it's OSS's data, and you paid OSS to store it. It's also likely encrypted in someway.
TLDR still, is especially when it's a reasonable amount of data, just have more than 1 backup.
Likewise if I store data with a cloud provider. Sure, Iron Mountain shouldn't just offer it up without proof, but if I give them notice of a legal case they should be sure to hold on to it, and if I win the case they need to hand it over to me. All I need to do is provide proof that I am the rightful owner of those goods.
>This wouldn't have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and populated it with a few hard drives.
Look, I know that a certain percentage of Tom's Hardware articles are just sales pitches for a NAS, but this is asinine. Iron Mountain deals largely in tape storage. 50TB of tapes fits in one of their small archive boxes. If they're using the latest tech (LTO-9), it fits on 3 tapes.
This is exactly how you are supposed to store archival media for decades, not on a NAS. A NAS is for storing the files you need to actively access.
Here is the source article...
https://current.org/2026/08/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over...