A PBS Station Just Lost Access to 70 Years of Its Archive When a Cloud Vendor Vanished

A St. Louis public television station has lost access to more than 50 terabytes of its own archive after the cloud vendor holding the files apparently went out of business. The material spans about 70 years of programming, and it is now sitting inside a Denver data center that so far has refused to hand it back.

The station is Nine PBS, and the story was reported by the public media outlet Current. According to the complaint, the case was filed by the operators of KETC (Channel 9) in Denver, because the cloud provider, Open Source Storage, kept its servers at a Colorado facility owned by Iron Mountain Data Centers. Nine PBS entered a relationship with a company described as OSS's predecessor back in 2019 and renewed the contract year after year, storing hardware, software, and cloud-based archival material through the vendor. When the station tried to schedule a renewal meeting in February, OSS went silent.

Here is where it fell apart. The contract gave Nine PBS 30 days to retrieve its data after service ended, but on March 6, the day the agreement was set to expire, OSS cut off access with no warning. When the station went looking for answers, it found OSS's website gone and the company listed as delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State. Digging further, Nine PBS learned OSS had been housing the archive at Iron Mountain, so it sent a demand letter asking the company to preserve the files. Iron Mountain first acknowledged it held the data and signaled it wanted to comply, then reversed course, saying its customer was OSS, which owned the physical servers housing the files. That left the station suing Iron Mountain to keep the archive from being deleted while the dispute plays out.

There has been movement in court. Judge Eric Eliff granted temporary relief barring Iron Mountain from deleting, modifying, or overwriting the material, and set a hearing. After it, VP and chief communications officer Leah Freeman told Gizmodo, "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." The blocked files reportedly include the station's coverage of the history of East St. Louis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Great Flood of 1993. So the files appear to be intact for now, and a court has affirmed the station owns them. Physically getting them back is the part still unresolved.

The detail worth sitting with is that this collection is not just old tape. Nine PBS signed on in September 1954 as KETC, one of the first community-licensed public TV stations in the country, and it has documented St. Louis life for seven decades. In its own 2024 community advisory notes, the station said some older material was already stored on outdated, degrading technology, and that it was working with the Missouri History Museum and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting to keep the content usable. The station has also said it holds some of the only surviving television record of the region because other local outlets lost their archives over time. That raises the stakes past a billing dispute. If these files vanish, a chunk of the region's recorded memory goes with them.

If you shoot, edit, or manage footage for a living, the lesson here is not "the cloud is bad." It is that outsourcing storage does not outsource responsibility, and a vendor's business health is now part of your backup strategy whether you think about it or not. The 3-2-1 rule still holds: three copies, on two types of media, with one kept off-site. A single vendor holding your only copy is not a backup, it is a single point of failure that can disappear when a company folds or gets sold. Read your contract for the exact off-boarding window, and treat that clause as a live risk, because a 30-day retrieval period is worthless if the other party stops answering the phone.

There is also a structural problem this case exposes that no individual can fully fix. When your data lives on hardware a third party owns inside a facility a fourth party operates, ownership of the bits and control of the machines can end up in different hands. That gap is exactly what Nine PBS is now litigating. For working shooters and small studios, the practical move is to keep at least one copy on media you physically control, verify your restores on a schedule instead of assuming the files are fine, and ask any storage vendor what happens to your data if they go under. The station in this case did much of the right thing and still ended up in court to reach its own footage.