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 under
There’s light at the end of the tunnel for Nine PBS. We reported last week that the station lost access to 50TB of data representing 70 years of TV history. The issue was that its cloud storage provider went out of business and access to this important set of backups was abruptly cut off. In the meantime, a judge has cleared the way for Nine PBS to retrieve its archival data and programming from Iron Mountain Data Centers.
Let us refresh your memories of this case by sketching out a timeline of how we got here, before discussing the latest ruling.
- 2019: Nine PBS began using Open Source Storage (OSS) as its cloud storage provider.
- 2019-2025: Annual cloud storage contract renewals occur without incident.
- February 2026: Nine PBS wanted to meet with OSS about contract renewal but couldn’t get in touch.
- March 6, 2026: Without any new agreement inked, the existing contract expired on March 6, with the terms allowing 30 days for the customer to retrieve their data. However, OSS seemed to cut off access to Nine PBS cloud data without any warning or any grace period.
- March 13, 2026: Nine PBS learned that OSS saved its cloud data at physical servers housed in Iron Mountain, Colorado. So it wrote to request that Iron Mountain preserve and return the data. However, Iron Mountain doesn’t confirm or deny that it holds this data.
- April 16, 2026: Nine PBS filed suit against OSS, and new OSS owner James Tramel confirms the data is secured at Iron Mountain.
- May 2026: Tramel stops responding, later claiming he was defrauded into buying OSS.
- June 2026: Nine PBS obtains a default judgment stating it owns the data in question and has the right to possess it. Later the same month, Iron Mountain admits it possesses the data. However, Iron Mountain decides to block any access as it says OSS owns the physical servers.
- July 28, 2026: Nine PBS files a lawsuit against Iron Mountain, the data center provider for OSS, seeking protection against data deletion or modification.
Nine PBS – “70 years of our organization’s history” in danger
The latest development in this twisting and turning case of Nine PBS’s lost data seems like good news for the station. On August 12, 2026, a Denver judge established a process that would allow Nine PBS to retrieve its 50TB of archival data from Iron Mountain’s Denver data center.
The outlined framework includes appointing a third-party vendor, such as a former OSS employee, to assist in the retrieval of the data from the hardware in Iron Mountain. This must be done within 30 days. Moreover, Nine PBS must pay the current and overdue storage fees that OSS missed, and any physical devices the third party takes off the premises must be returned to Iron Mountain after data retrieval. Lastly, Nine PBS must verify no other ex-OSS client data is accessed, and indemnify Iron Mountain against any corruption of data owned by others.
Both Nine PBS and Iron Mountain are requested to provide progress updates on the data retrieval process by September 14. Hopefully this will be a lesson learned by Nine PBS, and it will swiftly implement a proper 3-2-1 backup of its irreplaceable data, so any cloud provider error doesn’t cause such a calamity in the future.
