Judge clears Nine PBS to retrieve 70 years (50 TB)of archival TV data
Last week it was reported that a data retention contractor PBS used went out of business, making it impossible for them to retrieve their data stored at document storage company Iron Mountain. Things are looking more positive now, though, as a judge ruled PBS to be the owners of the data, allowing them to retrieve it (or, just leave it there managed by another contractor I suppose). Still, 3-2-1, folks.
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/cloud-storage/judge-clears-nine-pbs-to-retrieve-70-years-of-archival-tv-data-court-rules-station-owns-50tb-of-data-in-iron-mountain-servers-after-host-went-underOpen linkView original on piefed.zip
12 replies
Less than 1tb a year for a TV archive sounds sus.
Most of that is probably SD and 70 years probably doesn’t mean new original content every day for 70 years, just that the oldest item in their archive was that old.
Yeah for an organization like this, 3-2-1 should not have been difficult. 50TB sounds like a lot, but in the age of 20TB drives that's 3 drives worth of archiving. I don't expect them to have big tech levels of archiving ability, but it should be someone in IT's responsibility to make sure every quarter they do an rclone to a local drive setup. Hell I knew about 3-2-1 in college, anyone who works IT should have known.
Having worked with huge, slow organizations before, they probably had a mandate in place to outsource this kind of thing, and nobody in-house to evaluate the solution, so they picked an "expert" company who then went out of business.
It has been pointed out that the IT person listed is making over $150k a year. For that amount of money I'd think it's reasonable to expect they'd know better.
Who's to say they didn't though? With the possible exception of not checking the IT company's financial health (and maybe they did but decided it wasn't a risk), the process worked as intended. They outsourced their storage and backups. The data is still stored and backed up. They were able to follow a remediation protocol (ie speaking to the judge) to regain access.
A court order shouldn't be necessary for recovery in my opinion, that's why 3-2-1 is a thing; the backup data should be relatively easily accessible so that operations are interrupted for as little time as possible. If legal action is near the top of the remediation protocol, it's a bad protocol.
You said that more eloquently than I could; I disagreed with his reply but didn't want to use the downvote as a disagreement button.
Maybe. Nonprofits don't always have the best staff. Even if the IT folks did recommend it, I'd be unsurprised if it was rejected due to cost.
Knowing and budget are different matters.
Very tricky situation for both sides, I can see why a court order was necessary.
Piracy is a moral value.