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

PEnns "What, me worry?? Ha! My data is safe and happy in the Cloud . The joke is on you for buying hard drives and such!!" Reply

Buzdalys If after 70 years it never occurred to them that hosting your own data is safer and cheaper than paying big money every month for cloud storage, then they deserved this. Reply

marsilies rgd1101 said: probably didn't Due Diligence with the contract Even if the contract was iron-clad, it's not going to be of much help if the company just goes under with no advanced notice, and stops responding. Sure, they may be able to sue to recover some costs, but by that time the data could be gone. OSS's website may be gone, but a LinkedIn page still exists: Open Source Storage (OSS) empowers businesses with high-capacity, open-source storage solutions designed for archiving, managing, and retrieving large volumes of content, offering flexible deployment options and centralized control. OSS provides a comprehensive suite of products: 1. Vault Systems: Storage servers & tape libraries for on-premises deployments. 2. Vault Manager: Digital archive management platform for streamlined workflows. 3. Vault Cloud: Flexible cloud storage for scalable and accessible solutions. 4. Vault AI: Intelligent media management powered by artificial intelligence. lt sounds like this station went with option 3, probably an up sale from a previous on-site solution. I don't know who convinced them on-site was no longer necessary, but the cloud should be redundancy, not the only copy. As for Iron Mountain, they have a solid reputation, but primarily for storage of physical media. I'm going to guess OSS was sending tape backups of their cloud data there. In that case, I can see Iron Mountain's predicament, since while the data on the tapes may be this PBS Channel's , the tapes themselves are OSS's property, and Iron Mountain likely isn't authorized to do anything with the tapes directly, just store them. I do wonder if the best option is to run a crowdfund campaign for the PBS station to just buy OSS. It's really going to depend how much debt and liability there is there. Finally, I'm surprised it's only 50TB of data for 70 years of data, especially if any of it is video. I'm storing only a fraction of the video I think a PBS station would generate, over a fraction of that time, and I still have about 25TB of data. Reply

Captain COBOL 70 YEARS of data and they didn't even notice their cloud provider had gone out of business? Lol! Not sorry for them. Must be a top-notch IT organization! Reply

SirStephenH Buzdalys said: If after 70 years it never occurred to them that hosting your own data is safer and cheaper than paying big money every month for cloud storage, then they deserved this. It's not safer. A fire, multiple drive failure, someone accidentally or purposely hitting delete, software bug, electrical surge, theft, etc and your data's gone. Better to have at least one on-site and one cloud copy, although 3-2-1 is best. Reply

SirStephenH Should have had a local copy or two AND used a more reputable cloud provider like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon. Reply

King_V Given that it's PBS, and it seems that any funding they get is given begrudgingly and with resentment, when it's not being arbitrarily yanked away, it doesn't surprise me that they'd struggle to pay to get a proper local backup solution and someone to manage it. Reply

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