PBS Station Loses Access To 50TB Archive After Cloud Storage Company Goes Defunct

Image Courtesy: PBS

Nine PBS, a public television station in St. Louis, is fighting to recover more than 50TB of archival data after its cloud storage provider apparently went out of business, potentially putting seven decades of television history at risk.

The station had used Open Source Storage (OSS) and its predecessor since 2019 to store its extensive archive. Nine PBS planned to renew its contract on March 6, 2026, but the company stopped responding and access to the data was abruptly cut off. The station was reportedly supposed to have 30 days to retrieve its files after the contract ended. The situation was first reported by Current and detailed by Tom’s Hardware.

Nine PBS later discovered that the OSS website had disappeared and that the company was listed as delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State. The station also learned that OSS relied on Iron Mountain for its data center infrastructure.

Nine PBS sent Iron Mountain a demand to preserve the archive and requested that the company allow the station to recover its data. Iron Mountain initially did not confirm whether it was holding the files.

The station subsequently sued OSS and its leadership. The case was temporarily paused after James Tramel, who identified himself as a managing partner of a group that had acquired OSS, contacted Nine PBS. After communicating with the station for roughly a month, Tramel abruptly stopped responding. He later said he had been defrauded into acquiring the company and that ownership and operations had returned to its previous owners.

A Colorado court eventually ruled that Nine PBS had the right to access its data and ordered OSS to facilitate its transfer to another provider. That appeared to offer a path toward recovery, but Iron Mountain then became another obstacle.

After initially agreeing to return the data, Iron Mountain reportedly argued that OSS owned the material it was storing. Nine PBS has now sued Iron Mountain as well, seeking to prevent the archive from being deleted or otherwise becoming inaccessible.

The stakes are significant. Leah Freeman, Nine PBS’ vice president and chief content officer, told Current that the archive represents “70 years of our organization’s history.”

It remains unclear whether Nine PBS maintains complete backup copies elsewhere. The dispute highlights the risks organizations face when critical archives depend on third-party cloud providers without independent, accessible backups.

For Nine PBS, the immediate priority is securing the archive while the legal dispute continues. A court order requiring Iron Mountain to release the data could ultimately provide the clearest path forward, but until that happens, decades of television history remain caught in a dispute between a broadcaster, a failed storage company and its data center provider.