Cloud storage is great until your vendor goes out of business

Nine PBS, a PBS station in St. Louis, Missouri, must be given access to data it lost when its vendor went out of business, a judge ruled this week. Nine PBS, a PBS station in St. Louis, Missouri, sued data center company Iron Mountain in July to gain access to an archive of 70 years' worth of cultural artifacts, The Denver Post reported. The station filed its lawsuit after Iron Mountain allegedly refused to hand over data it hosted on behalf of Nine PBS's now defunct cloud service provider Open Source Storage (OSS).

Engadget has asked Nine PBS to comment on the ruling. We'll update this article if we hear back.

The trapped archive includes TV shows, videos, photos and other digital cultural objects relevant to St. Louis' history, according to a copy of the lawsuit viewed by The Denver Post. In March, Nine PBS learned that Open Source Storage, its cloud storage provider, wasn't renewing its contract, but rather than give the station 30 days to retrieve the archive, the company cut off access immediately. The station was then able to get in contact with Open Source Storage's new owner to confirm the archive was actually safe in April.

After the owner left the company, though, the station turned to help from Iron Mountain, which physically hosted the data for Open Source Storage. At least so far, Iron Mountain has refused to hand over the data — since its contract is technically with OSS rather than Nine PBS, according to the lawsuit — prompting Nine PBS to pursue legal action.

"Iron Mountain has acted appropriately and responsibly at every step to safeguard customer data and honor our contractual commitments to OSS," a company spokesperson said in a statement to Engadget. "Throughout this process, we have been transparent with Nine PBS about our role in this dispute, that we do not have access to their data, and we have made consistent efforts to help them resolve the issue."

In a hearing on Wednesday, a judge ordered Iron Mountain to cooperate in any way possible with Nine PBS to retrieve the data, Current reports. The judge also ruled that the station must identify a third-party vendor who can help access the data from Iron Mountain's data center and ensure it doesn't harm data from other OSS clients. Should the process of retrieving the data be more complicated, the judge said another hearing would be scheduled. "We appreciate the Court's thoughtful decision establishing a path forward to access and recover our archival materials, which the Court confirmed that Nine PBS rightfully owns," Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman told Current.

While Nine PBS is now on its way to hopefully saving its digital archive, much of this drama could have been avoided with a safer approach to data storage. The most common recommendation is to follow what's called the "3-2-1 rule," where you keep three copies of each file across two different mediums (like a physical hard drive and a cloud storage service), with one copy kept offsite. Following the 3-2-1 rule gives you backups if your cloud storage provider goes out of business or your physical drive dies, and means that a flood or fire that destroys one file will, barring global disaster, leave at least one copy untouched.