posted in Technology
PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1332594/pbs-broadcaster-loses-access-to-50tb-of-data-comprising-70-years-of-tv-history-after-con
current.org/2026/08/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over-blocked-access-to-archival-data/
Piracy is media preservation
I plead the fifth on that. But how come no backup on this. I am pretty sure they could got at least 50 people to get 1 tb hard drives so their data wouldn’t go this route. And probably more since PBS shaped whole generations of kids and adults into better people.
15x8TB drives gives you about 72TB in raidz2, for about £4k in disks, add a server for say £2k
So by not spending £6k they lost everything, they spent $19million on IT in 2025
Someone fucked up
you forgot the $10K in labour to handle the backups
changes everything on that $19M budget!
That’s budget for the whole network, this happened to a small local station.
A tiny PBS office in St Louis has a $19 million/year IT budget? I really doubt that.
I may have taken the whole PBS accounts, I’m not from the US