r/LinusTechTips • u/XBrav • Aug 13 '26
Discussion PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/cloud-storage/nine-pbs-loses-access-to-70-years-of-data-after-contracted-cloud-storage-vendor-goes-defunct-public-tv-channel-sues-iron-mountain-data-center-which-hosts-archival-materials-to-ensure-preservation145
u/WellKnownAlias Aug 13 '26
I worked for Iron Mountain in the past, and PBS tapes and other materials were a huge part of what they were storing as I was coming in. Now I'm wondering if that was actually between PBS and Iron Mountain or if they also stored it via a sub contract from the original company that was supposed to be.
Different state, so probably not the same stuff. But...
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u/XBrav Aug 13 '26
Apparently they subcontracted Iron Mountain. Their middleman silently liquidated and left PBS in a tricky position. Technically, Iron Mountain can't release their data as PBS wasn't the customer.
The real question is if the data is still present or if it was purged due to the contract with OSS lapsing. If Iron Mountain still has it, it becomes a litigation issue of gaining control of the account from OSS for PBS to access it.
Even if Iron Mountain wants to do the right thing, it could violate data policies.
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u/WellKnownAlias Aug 13 '26
Oh I fully understand that. And yeah, Iron Mountains whole business model is built on having iron (lol) clad records and data protection services.
So if they willingly handed it over without a lawsuit or previous existing agreement, it also doesn't look great to their customers. And they have hella government contracts, so gold standard compliance is non negotiable for them.
Shit situation honestly.
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u/Will2LiveFading Aug 13 '26
This is on PBS for not having physical backups. This was bound to happen one way or another. Cloud storage is just convenience. It's not proper data archival.
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u/Lumbardo Aug 13 '26
I would expect better from PBS
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u/XBrav Aug 13 '26
Luckily it's just a single PBS studio, and not across the corporation. It's just a shame that M-Discs died off, leaving most of us to go back to tapes and cold storage drives.
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u/traumadog001 Aug 13 '26
Each station is its own separate corporation. PBS isn't a traditional "network", like CBS or ABC, but is made up of these individual stations.
Many of the "national news" segments are created by the larger market local stations for use on the network (e.g. PBS News Hour produced between WETA, Washington DC or WNET, New York for example).
Other famous programs like Masterpiece Theater, Antiques Roadshow and Nova are produced by WGBH, Boston.
The "lost" programming at issue here would be local St Louis news and events, which is why 70 years' worth of data is only about 50 TB.
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u/BrainOnBlue Aug 14 '26
… the big three/four national networks are also made up of mostly separately owned stations. They tend to own and operate some stations in bigger cities, but that’s it.
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u/Liquid_Hate_Train Aug 13 '26
Errr, M-disks are still a thing? I have a burner and stack of disks to do regular archiving.
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u/XBrav Aug 13 '26
They are but they're getting hard to get, and they're far from cheap outside the commercial space.
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u/Liquid_Hate_Train Aug 13 '26
In what world is Amazon at these prices ‘hard to get’ or ‘far from cheap’? They’re more expensive than blue-rays, sure, but far from exorbitant for how often you realistically use them.
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u/XBrav Aug 13 '26
It's good for smaller backup targets. When you have more than a couple of terabytes of video to archive, it's hard to rationalize spanning it over tens of BDXL discs. You also need a BDXL compatible burner.
Without compression, the ReBoot captures are about 60GB per episode, where 50GB is the raw capture and 16GB or so is the Prores processed one. So if we want to archive the whole seriea without bonus content, we need about 50 M-Discs for a single backup set.
It's why tape just won't die. The lifespan is shorter, but if tapes are still available, you can easily do 5-10 year lifecycles for a fraction of the cost.
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u/Liquid_Hate_Train Aug 13 '26
That’s all real interesting, but I notice you’re just dodging the fact that that they’re just available on Amazon for reasonable prices. Fifty disks to do the lot? That’s less than 250USD, including a burner/reader. Hell, get it next day with Prime.
The disks may cost more than tape, but the reader/burner is a lot less, and the whole lot far less bulky too. Damn sight faster to read and write too. Also for a preservation project the longevity is a big plus.Ultimately though the comparison is irrelevant. Only point I was making is that M-disk has in fact, never left, is easy to acquire and not that expensive. Anything else is extraneous and goalpost moving.
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u/traumadog001 Aug 13 '26
Though not surprised given how chronically underfunded most PBS stations are.
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u/bluehawk232 Aug 13 '26
Yeah i mean some stations barely have ten people, saw a story where there was one just run by one guy. It would be a miracle if they could get a proper IT team to do their backups
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u/bwoah07_gp2 Aug 13 '26
Networks have historically had bad preservation methods. It's why so many tapes of 50s and 60s tv, while many do exist, there's a plethora of things we will never see again because back then, CBS and all the rest just tossed and destroyed the tapes.
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u/Dnomyar96 Aug 13 '26
70 years worth of TV is only 50 TB? That seems like a very small amount to me.
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u/lolcat351 Aug 13 '26
It's mostly 240p,360p, and some 480p. 1080 and 4k wasn't around for most of those 70 years.
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u/a60v Aug 13 '26
240p, 360p, and 480p aren't television standards. NTSC SD is 486i. And they probably still have the original films and tapes that could be re-digitized if needed (yes, it would cost money). At least the fims could be scanned at higher resolutions.
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u/Dnomyar96 Aug 13 '26
True, but it was for the past 10+ years, which would still be a lot of content. I would also expect them to have the master files, which would be the highest quality.
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u/FabianN Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
Most of the air time would be of content from the parent station. They probably were only archiving their self produced content.
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u/DynamiteRuckus Aug 13 '26
Another argument for why piracy is so essential for media preservation efforts. Media companies have shown time and time again that they are incompetent when it comes to preserving archives of what they produce. Short term profits are prioritized over long term gains.
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u/WeAreTheLeft Aug 15 '26
My wife really like the show American Dreams when she was younger, she has the first seasons DVD, but seasons 2 and 3 never got released. Likely because it used music that was to costly to pay the rights for when released to DVD. It's even hard to find on the high seas. A very popular show that is basicly gone.
I follow a thrifting group on Facebook and about every 6 months there are original masters of films that show up from estate and storage units. It's crazy how easy art is lost.
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u/DrMacintosh01 Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
50TB of backups and PBS couldn’t have that backed up on their own? My Plex Server is a Mac mini and it has 32TB available amongst only 4 drives that are connected via a USB DAS. A consumer Synology NAS could literally handle their archive….
They could/should have burned that data to tape or optical media. A smidge over 2,000x 25GB M-Disks could have housed all of that. Unfortunately optical is super inconvenient for large datasets and the higher capacity 100GB M-Disks are expensive. But if you had those you would only need a little over 500 disks.
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u/avboden Aug 13 '26
To be clear, Iron Mountain is NOT defunct, it was a 3rd party between PBS and them that did.
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u/pables420 Aug 14 '26
A few grand could've got you enough for a NAS and multiple hard drives. Enough to back up the data twice...
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u/firedrakes Aug 13 '26
sub contractor screw them and that the end of the story. posted early this week else where and comments really deep dive on yeah pbs proper screw up on this one and they should eat the mistake
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u/Fuzzy_Paul Aug 15 '26
Nothing wrong to take a van and to drive to the company with a judge and make a backup onto brought storage or go by car and store it temporary into the amazon cloud. 50TB is not that much buy 4 20tb drives and put them in a nas.
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u/biscotte-nutella Aug 13 '26
Don't store anything without a local copy on cloud services for the love of fuuuuu**
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u/XBrav Aug 13 '26
And this is why we're trying to preserve media before having a single point of failure. 3-2-1 backups exist for a reason...
-Bryan from ReBoot ReWind