Nine PBS secures court order to recover 70-year archive from Iron Mountain
Judge mandates data centre provider to cooperate with station, which must now engage a third-party vendor to retrieve cultural artifacts held in limbo.
A judge has ordered Iron Mountain to cooperate with Nine PBS, a public broadcasting station in St. Louis, to facilitate the retrieval of a 70-year archive of cultural artifacts. The ruling follows a lawsuit filed by Nine PBS against the data centre provider after the station’s cloud provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), ceased operations and abruptly cut off access to the data.
The dispute began in March 2026 when Nine PBS learned that OSS was not renewing its contract. Rather than providing the standard 30-day notice, the company immediately cut off access to the archive. Although the station confirmed in April that the data remained safe with OSS’s new owner, access was blocked again after that owner departed the company.
Iron Mountain, which physically hosted the data for OSS, initially refused to release the materials, maintaining that its contractual obligations were solely with OSS and not Nine PBS. A company spokesperson stated that Iron Mountain had acted responsibly to safeguard customer data and honour its commitments to OSS, while remaining transparent about its role in the dispute.
In a hearing on Wednesday, the judge ruled that Iron Mountain must cooperate in any way possible to help Nine PBS retrieve the data. The station must also identify a third-party vendor to assist in accessing the data from Iron Mountain’s facility, ensuring that the retrieval process does not harm data belonging to other OSS clients.
Nine PBS Vice President and Chief Content Officer Leah Freeman welcomed the decision, stating that the court confirmed the station rightfully owns the archival materials. The archive includes television shows, videos, photographs, and other digital cultural objects relevant to the history of St. Louis.
The judge indicated that another hearing would be scheduled if the data retrieval process proves more complicated than anticipated. While Nine PBS moves forward with the recovery, industry observers note that the situation highlights the risks of single-point cloud storage failures.
Standard data protection advice often cites the "3-2-1 rule" to mitigate such risks: keeping three copies of files across two different mediums, with one copy stored offsite. This approach ensures that if one provider fails or physical media is destroyed, at least one copy of the data remains intact.
Engadget has requested comment from Nine PBS regarding the ruling but had not received a response at the time of reporting. The long-term availability of the archive now depends on the success of the third-party vendor’s involvement and the technical complexities of the retrieval.
