By solving this as they have done, Iron Mountain can assure other clients they will not just let a third person circumvent their clients. They can now say they only did it by a court order even if they were more than willing to accept the asterisk and do it on principle. Everyone is happy. Everyone is whole.
If you are wharehousing data, you dont just let your customer's customer come in, look around, and take whatever they want. Even if they have a sob story.
You ask for a court order with specifics.
Also some articles and people on social media were unclear that it was just a single PBS station involved, rather than all PBS content. I saw comments that thought that all the archives for Sesame Street were lost.
Sometimes things are transmitted in painful ways like rebroadcast in off hours over microwave links between members so they can re-record what they lost.
Plus the endless game of "hey does anyone have that one obscure episode of this one program we made?" to your colleagues...
If you are wharehousing data, you dont just let your customer's customer come in, look around, and take whatever they want. Even if they have a sob story.
You ask for a court order with specifics.
It's unfair when you do the best you can and suddenly you have to talk to lawyers.
Well, PBS didn't do the best they could. Aside from the whole "one backup is no backup" problem, they should've immediately made a new backup as soon as Open Source Storage didn't want to renew their contract and stopped responding to them.
That's the most screaming-red, horn-blaring, strobe-flashing warning that they were about to go under and it was the job of the PBS CTO (who makes $180k/yr) to recognise that and respond immediately (i.e., send an intern the nearest Best Buy to buy 70TB of HDDs, they'd probably still have enough space in their bag to do a coffee run on the way back).
> Wasn’t there an avenue for the CEO to send a letter to Iron Mountain mapping the data and its owners or make an arrangement to legally transfer the data or something?
And if they made a mistake in providing the mapping (given they were a company going bankrupt, they might have trouble getting staff to do a complete audit of their customer data)? I would be surprised if the CEO would not be personally on the hook if they violated HIPPA or some other privacy requirement by allowing PBS access to something by accident.
Once a company is in dire straits like this, sussing out problems like this is one of the main purposes of the legal system. Ironically, 70TB of HDDs probably cost less than the first demand letter PBS sent to Iron Mountain.
Holy hell, I wanted to see them get this suit dismissed just to rub it into their faces what mindless idiots were in charge of this fiasco.