GoKawiilFacepalm: Entrusting critical systems to external tech companies can be dangerous because they might suddenly shut down or come under new management. Nine PBS is currently learning this lesson, along with the importance of maintaining additional backups, amid court proceedings against a data center with a murky ownership history.
Nine PBS in St. Louis is suing the owner of a Denver-based data center after spending much of this year attempting to regain access to more than 50TB of its archival data. The data center became defunct and changed ownership multiple times under circumstances that remain unclear.
According to public media outlet Current, the station began entrusting the massive trove of data, which includes 70 years of broadcast history, to a data center described in court filings only as "OSS predecessor," in 2019. Nine PBS renewed its contract each year, even after its partner changed its name to Open Source Storage, until February 2026, when the data center stopped responding.
Despite the contract's 30-day grace period, OSS abruptly cut off access to the archive on March 6 without offering the station an opportunity to renew. Upon investigation, Nine PBS discovered that the data center was delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State and its website had shut down. It was only later that the station discovered that another company, Iron Mountain, owned OSS.
The runaround became more confusing from there. After demanding that Iron Mountain preserve and return the archive, Nine PBS sued OSS and its purported president, Charles Wells, in the St. Louis Circuit Court on April 16, but paused proceedings after James Tramel, a "managing partner" of an unnamed group that acquired OSS, confirmed that the data was safe.
Even stranger, Nine PBS lost contact with Tramel after about a month and eventually received an automatic email stating that he was no longer connected to OSS. He later claimed that he had been "defrauded" into buying OSS, after which multiple prior owners assumed control of the data center. Nine PBS later resumed the lawsuit after Iron Mountain initially pledged to turn over the station's archives but later changed its mind, with hearings set to begin this week.
While the circumstances behind OSS's disappearance and revolving door of owners remain mysterious, Nine PBS's struggles serve as another reminder of the importance of redundant backups. South Korea's government discovered this late last year after losing 858TB in a data center fire.