August 13, 2026
Sesame Street meets storage meltdown
PBS loses 70 years of TV history after cloud storage vendor goes defunct
Commenters are stunned as a local PBS station’s history hangs by a thread
TLDR: Nine PBS says 70 years of local TV history may be lost after its storage provider disappeared and the company holding the files won’t release them without a legal fight. Commenters turned it into a brutal backup debate, with equal parts panic, smug “I told you so,” and apocalypse-level jokes.
This story hit the internet like a horror movie for anyone who has ever trusted “the cloud.” A single local PBS station, Nine PBS — not all of PBS, as one commenter quickly corrected — says more than 70 years of shows, archives, and station history could be trapped after its storage company seemingly vanished. Website gone, contract renewal ignored, ownership drama, lawsuits flying, and a giant records company admitting it has the data but still refusing to hand it over without a court fight? Readers were basically screaming: how is this even real?
And then came the comments, where the real blood sport began. One camp treated this as a cautionary tale about backup basics: if your priceless history lives in one place, people online say you’re playing with fire. Literally. One user calmly flexed their own setup — cloud storage plus a local backup — while others went full doomsday planner, arguing you should have multiple copies spread far apart so one fire or earthquake can’t wipe everything out. Another hot take pushed back on the panic, saying a home copy is actually more likely to burn than a professional data center, which sparked the classic internet fight: trust the cloud, trust your house, or trust nothing at all.
The humor was dark, but sharp. People were side-eyeing the idea that a major public media group may not have had a proper fallback, while others were obsessed with the bizarre corporate soap opera: acquired, “defrauded,” ownership reverted, automated replies, everyone pointing fingers. It wasn’t just a tech mishap to the crowd — it was a full-on digital custody battle with America’s TV memories caught in the middle.
Key Points
- •Nine PBS lost access earlier this year to more than 50TB of archived programming and materials stored with Open Source Storage, which the station says had served as its vendor since 2019.
- •The station found OSS unresponsive, its website offline, and the company listed as delinquent under the Colorado Secretary of State.
- •Nine PBS learned that OSS used Iron Mountain’s services and later confirmed through Iron Mountain that the company held the station’s data.
- •A court ruled that Nine PBS has the right to access its data and that OSS should facilitate transfer to a new vendor.
- •After Iron Mountain initially agreed to release the data but later said OSS owned it, Nine PBS moved to sue Iron Mountain as well to prevent possible deletion of the archive.