PBS affiliate sues Iron Mountain to recover 50TB of archival data after cloud provider’s collapse

A Denver District Court lawsuit filed by Nine PBS, the PBS affiliate in St. Louis, accuses Iron Mountain Data Centers of withholding approximately 50TB of the station’s archival data. The data, stored by a now-defunct cloud provider called Open Source Storage (OSS), includes local historical records such as coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, East St. Louis history, and The Great Flood of 1993, as well as more than 11,000 files, according to court documents and local reporting.

Nine PBS alleges that OSS used Iron Mountain’s Denver data center to host the station’s data and that OSS became unresponsive after the station’s contract expired on March 6. The station says it attempted to retrieve the data within a 30-day window provided by its contract but lost access when the contract ended. Nine PBS later learned that OSS had ceased operations and was listed as delinquent by the Colorado Secretary of State, the complaint states.

The lawsuit, filed on July 28, asserts that most of the archival data is unique and irreplaceable. A judge ruled last month that Iron Mountain must not delete or modify the data and scheduled a hearing to determine how to facilitate access. At a subsequent hearing, the judge ordered Iron Mountain to hand over any physical devices holding the data to a third party—potentially a former OSS employee—for extraction within 30 days, provided the process does not expose or corrupt data belonging to other OSS clients.

Iron Mountain responded in a statement to Ars Technica that it has acted appropriately and responsibly to safeguard customer data and honor its contractual commitments to OSS. The company emphasized that it only provides physical infrastructure—such as buildings, power, and connectivity—and does not have access to the data on customers’ hardware, which it says belongs to its clients. Iron Mountain added that granting unauthorized access to third-party hardware could violate data privacy protocols, breach its contract with OSS, and risk exposing confidential information belonging to other OSS clients.

Nine PBS maintains in court filings that it rightfully owns the data and has already obtained a default judgment against OSS in St. Louis Circuit Court, which confirmed the station’s immediate right to possess the data and ordered OSS to return it or facilitate its transfer. Nine PBS says it offered to pay reasonable costs to access the data but alleges Iron Mountain has refused to release it, citing its contract with OSS rather than the station.

The parties are required to provide updates to the court by September 14. If complications arise during extraction—such as encrypted data—another hearing will be scheduled to determine next steps.