A St. Louis PBS station says its 70-year archive of programming is stuck in a Denver data center after a cloud storage company cut off the TV station’s access to the 50 terabytes of data this spring.
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Nine PBS filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Denver District Court seeking the safe return of the data, which the station’s attorneys believe is being stored within Iron Mountain Data Centers DEN-1, a data center at 4300 Brighton Road in north Denver.
The digital archive of TV shows, videos, photos and other material is “culturally important to the St. Louis area and most of it is unique and irreplaceable,” the lawsuit reads. A court filing lists more than 11,000 files, many with names that mention key St. Louis historical figures, including educator Susan Blow, jazz musician Willie Akins and artist Roscoe Misselhorn. Other files were labeled “gospel aerobics,” “dancing doctors,” “bison hunt,” and “fiddle kid,” the court filing shows.
“We are committed to ensuring we can recover and restore full access to this valuable content, which holds significant historical importance for St. Louis,” Leah Freeman, vice president and chief communications officer at Nine PBS, said in a statement Wednesday.
Denver District Court Judge Eric Eliff on Wednesday ordered that the data be preserved and prohibited Iron Mountain Data Centers from deleting, modifying or destroying the archives. The judge set a hearing for Aug. 12 in the case.
Nine PBS lost access to its archives in March when the company they had used for cloud storage, Open Source Storage, unexpectedly failed to renew its annual contract with the TV station. In such a scenario, Nine PBS should have had 30 days to retrieve its data, according to the lawsuit. Instead, Open Source Storage immediately cut off access to the data without warning, the TV station’s attorneys alleged.
In April, the PBS station took legal action in Missouri, but withdrew that effort when a new owner of the company agreed to give the TV station the data. That owner provided “proof of life” for the data in late April, confirming the data was “physically secure and fully accounted for” on Open Source Storage’s servers, according to the complaint.
However, by June, the new owner was gone from the company, according to the complaint, and claimed he had been defrauded into purchasing Open Source Storage, which he said had “serious problems with the business and the data it houses,” according to the lawsuit.
The TV station then renewed its legal efforts, leading to the lawsuit filed Tuesday in Denver against Iron Mountain Data Centers. The data center has refused to return the archives to Nine PBS on the grounds that Open Source Storage owns “the physical services housing the data at Iron Mountain,” according to the lawsuit.
Representatives of Iron Mountain Data Centers and Open Source Storage did not immediately return requests for comment Wednesday.
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