From yesterday 100 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285418

Also just one station not all of PBS

Loses "access to" the data. The data is still there, they're just waiting for a court order.

Why should they have to get a court order when the party in custody said they have the data? Unless they don't actually have the data and they're hiding behind the court.

Iron Mountain doesn't have it in the PBS station's account, it's in OSS's account. Instead of taking on the liability of deciding whether PBS should really have the data or if they're mistaken or even fraudulent, Iron Mountain is waiting for the court to sort that out.

Their contract said that they had 30 days to get the data when OSS went bust. Instead, IM cut them off immediately. They need the court order to make IM comply with existing contracts.

Holy reading comprehension and assumption creep! Nobody said that it was OK. But losing data and losing access to the data is clearly not the same thing. That’s why this clickbait headline decided to say the former instead of the latter, because it sounds worse. Read the article.

Because it's not their customer, the defunct company is.

If you had an account with them, how would you feel if some unknown third party could call them up and go "Uh hello you have my data give me access plz trust me bro"

How unknown is a well known PBS affiliate?

Such data should never be held by a third party unless it is one of several duplicates.

I keep photos on Google and MS but they are short term storage only and never the only copy.

Yeah well you are not holding 90 TB of data based on the decisions of a chain of supervisors.

People like me who no longer pay attention enough after seeing so much upheaval in the cloud space are losing out on ideas of best practice and giving in to whatever works for the time being.

I've kept all photos on iCloud since decades; there's too many to move elsewhere and keep updated, but the local copy on my Mac is regularly backed up to a Time Machine disk.

The magic of public-private partnerships strikes again.

Like most of the time, this will probably be held for some kind of extortionist legal ransom. We just love handing our stuff over to bad-faith third-parties in the name of some kind of imagined freedom. Just can't get enough of it. Public infrastructure, national archives, city services, we just seem to be completely deer-in-the-headlights when they pull this stuff on the daily...

So here we go again. We blindly trust in private parties always magically acting in good faith when there's billions on the table incentivizing them not to.

We've been doing it like this for 40 years and it hasn't worked, but I'm sure our ideological commitments will bend reality eventually.

This is your money btw.

Pbs is offering to pay for the recovery, but the company who supposedly has the data basically went non responsive. Honestly this sounds like a mishandled going out of business where the company left with the assets was not prepared to deal with the customers at all.

We'll see. It's crazy that we still have lots of institutions that would have taken this seriously.

County libraries, city hall records, large public universities.

It should have been like "hey, UNC Chapel Hill" or "Los Angeles County" take care of this.

I mean maybe things like that happen, like UTexas just loses multiple shelves mysteriously in their special collections, but I've never heard of it.

I just hate when ideological commitments shove reasonable solutions like this off the table

I don't trust cloud services; I bought a 12T USB hard drive for my backups.

Statistically a fire is more likely to burn your 1 copy than the data center I bet. Ideally you have both, that survives almost anything outside thermonuclear war

Probably should buy three, and put them in places far enough apart that an earthquake or large fire won't get all of them at once.