This is wild.

A PBS station in St Louis contracted with a company to store an archive of their files and broadcasts. When that company went bankrupt, the station lost access to its archive. The station sued the company, and is now suing the server farm where that company was leasing space to store the archive.

Nine PBS in St. Louis filed a lawsuit against information management corporation Iron Mountain Data Centers July 28, seeking to recover over 50 terabytes of archival materials stored in one of the company’s Denver-based data centers.

The lawsuit filed in Denver District Court alleges that the station’s cloud-storage vendor, Open Source Storage, abruptly cut off access to Nine PBS’ data earlier this year without warning. It states OSS, which had a separate relationship with Iron Mountain to provide data storage, went “defunct,” leaving Nine PBS’ archives in a data center operated by Iron Mountain.

Iron Mountain has refused to return the materials to the station because its client, OSS, technically owned “the physical services housing the data” within Iron Mountain, according to the complaint.

Here’s why it is wild: This was the PBS station’s only copy. They broke the basic rule of always having a copy and a backup.

This is exactly why we have this rule!