Nine PBS is afraid that it will lose over 70 years of archival materials and programming after its contracted cloud storage vendor has apparently gone out of business. According to Current, the channel used Open Source Storage, or OSS, for storing over 50TB of data — but it suddenly lost access to its data earlier this year. Nine PBS has been working with OSS and its predecessor since 2019 and intended to renew its contract on March 6 of this year. The company never responded and abruptly cut off the station’s data access even though it still had 30 days to retrieve its data after the contract ended.
The station dug a little bit deeper when it discovered that the OSS website no longer existed and was listed as delinquent under the Colorado Secretary of State. It also discovered that OSS utilized Iron Mountain’s services, so it sent a demand letter to the latter to preserve its data and to “pay any reasonable costs associated with its demand.” At the time, Iron Mountain did not confirm or deny that it possessed Nine PBS’ data.
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Cloud storage is just someone elses computer.
3-2-1 people
I know a triplet who works in infrastructure. He would agree.
3-2-1 data
But the cloud is safe secure and forever how could this happen
Wait, you mean the cloud is somebody else’s computer!!?
It’s safe if you’re following proper backup procedures.
3 backups in 2 different forms of media with 1 being off-site
A single point of failure is always a bad thing.
Another 21st century mantra:
TWO IS ONE; ONE IS NONE
And a backup is not a backup until you successfully restored from it.
Yeah, the cloud makes proper 3-2-1 backups easier, *but you still need to take care of the rest of the 3-2-1. The cloud takes care of a third of the 3, half of the 2, and satisfies the 1. But it’s not a complete 3-2-1 backup by itself, and anyone selling it as such is blowing smoke up your ass to get a sale.
If done right, a third party could do 3-2-1 for you.
But unlike in this case, to do it right your clients need to know where the data is stored, and any 3rd party you contract with should have a clause that establishes your client as the data owner (as well as requirements for data return if the business closes).
This would have been easily avoidable, most likely if IT was allowed to be part of the contracting discussion.
A single place can’t do 3-2-1. That’s not “3” (just a single company = single point of failure, as demonstrated here)
Did you not read my comment?
I did. Did you not read mine? If a single 3rd party entity is setting up all your backups, then that single entity still controls your destiny. That’s still a bad idea.
So you didn’t read my comment, because I already addressed all of your points.
I literally stated how to prevent what happened here.
no it’s not… you’re thinking of stuff being restored but that doesn’t account for neglect and straight up theft of your information from these unsecure criminal companies like microslop
Not to mention Microsoft has 400 forced copies of the same useless thing for work saved on multiple desktops that are not on my damn computer and need to be downloaded.
Fuck it shits me
That’s a different conversation.
But you can encrypt at rest the data you store in the cloud (with keys your provider doesn’t have) without a lot of trouble.
Or if it’s decentralized and deduplicated, just as IPFS or Iroh.
This story is in regards to a single PBS station in Missouri and not the national organization, in case anyone missed that.
IMO if a cloud storage company is gonna shut down, they should legally be required to send you the storage device(s) your data is on.
50 TB isn’t even all that much for your own NAS.
Well, it is now.
still cheaper then monthly payments on some garbage subscription that keeps increasing in costs and decreasing in services and having the extra high chance of theft because you’re giving everything to a criminal
It isn’t much by todays standards. But imagine even a just a tenth of this (accounting for lover quality back then) for the older half of that data by 2000’s storage costs.
Whether 50TB of lost data is “much” depends on what the data is, and whether it’s replaceable.
I think they were talking about PBS having an on site storage solution to mitigate the risk for this exact scenario.
Before the AI price hike, a 50TB NAS would be less than $5k.
I have a ~24TB usable array at home that cost me less than $700, built just before the AI bullshit. The 4x 12TB disks were $120 each. And it’s got a second legacy array in there with another 4 drives.
It’s general consumer hardware, because I had some of it on hand when transitioning from a Synology box, but it’s not much more to have made it from scratch with enterprise rack mount stuff. $5k could get you quite a bit more than 50TB.
Me: I wonder how much Trump is related to… Oh, hi Blackrock…
So the company pulled some shady shit and now the new company that bought out the old one doesn’t want to do anything. PBS needs to get a court order in to keep Iron Mountain from deleting that data while the court case is ongoing. They didn’t follow the data backup guidelines but they did take the appropriate steps to retrieve their data.
Do they really not have more than one backup?
