August 13, 2026
Masterpiece Theatre of Errors
PBS loses 50TB of data; 70 years of TV history after cloud vendor defunct
Commenters are roasting the tiny mystery company as fans panic over TV history in limbo
TLDR: Nine PBS says 70 years of local TV archives are stuck after its storage vendor apparently collapsed, and it’s now suing to stop the files from being deleted. Commenters are split between outrage over the sketchy-looking vendor, corrections that the data may still exist, and arguments over whether better backups could have prevented this mess.
This story hit readers like a lost-tape horror movie: a single public TV station, Nine PBS in St. Louis, says 50 terabytes of archives — about 70 years of its history — could slip away after its cloud storage company seemingly vanished. The website disappeared, messages stopped, ownership got weird, and now the station is in a legal tug-of-war with both the storage vendor and Iron Mountain, the company that admitted it physically holds the files. In plain English: the shows may still exist, but Nine PBS can’t simply get them back.
And oh, the comments were ready. One camp instantly went full detective, poking through the vendor’s website and LinkedIn like true-crime sleuths, asking the brutal question: how did a company that looked this tiny land a job storing decades of TV history? Others jumped in to cool down the headline drama, stressing that this is one PBS affiliate, not all of PBS, and that the data is legally trapped, not necessarily gone forever. Then came the backup wars: one side mocked the article’s “just buy a cheap storage box” energy, while the other treated the whole mess as a giant warning label for bad planning. A softer, almost wistful note came from people saying this is why archivists and the Internet Archive matter so much. The overall mood? Equal parts panic, nitpicking, and “you cannot be serious” laughter at a disaster that feels too absurd to be real.
Key Points
- •Nine PBS says it lost access to more than 50TB of archived programming and materials stored with Open Source Storage, putting about 70 years of history at risk.
- •The station found OSS unresponsive, its website gone, and the company listed as delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State.
- •Nine PBS learned OSS used Iron Mountain services and later got confirmation from Iron Mountain that it held the data.
- •A court ruled that Nine PBS has rights to access its data and that OSS should facilitate transfer to a new vendor.
- •Iron Mountain initially agreed to release the data but later said OSS owned it, prompting Nine PBS to sue Iron Mountain to prevent possible deletion.