PBS Affiliate Threatened by Potential 50TB Data Loss After Cloud Provider Vanishes

50TB data loss sparks lawsuit against Iron Mountain

The St. Louis PBS station Nine PBS has filed a federal suit in the Denver District Court demanding access to a trove of archival material that vanished when its cloud partner, Open Source Storage, folded. The station alleges that Iron Mountain’s Denver data center, which housed the files, is refusing to release them, leaving the broadcaster facing a ↓ 50TB void that includes coverage of the COVID‑19 pandemic, the 1993 Great Flood, and more than ↓ 11,000 files dating back 70 years.

“Most of this content is unique and irreplaceable,” the filing states.

Nine PBS cites the loss of historic footage as a threat to public‑service journalism. The dispute highlights the risks of outsourcing critical media archives to third‑party cloud providers. For background on similar media‑storage conflicts see Reuters and AP News.