Data you only have one copy of is data you don’t mind losing.
Or can’t afford yo duplicate in this economy
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
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
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.
Heck its pbs. They should have publically archived it so anyone could keep a copy. At least the old stuff.
I’m having a vague memory of some (cartoon) creator or artist who was thankful to torrents because the show that was the cornerstone of their “portfolio” got delisted from a streaming platform’s catalog.
Is this true?
Iirc is “The Owl House”
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Oh sweet child you have a rather myopic view of the weird shit pirates find and their willingness to data hoard.
"What do you mean I should* remove data?? I might need this! " - definitely not me
I once put a ton of effort into tracking down episodes and information of a random Spanish Telanovella I caught on the Spanish channel once. Including recording and digitizing episodes.
I don’t even speak Spanish at all at the time, the show just seemed interesting.
I’ve lso converted a bunch of old Zines from a UK school to PDF because a musician I like was involved and the only copies were behind some weird paywall magazine site. Bunch of print screens and a script to crop double pages to single pages then merge them together.
Maybe I should try putting them somewhere like archive.org.
Please do. The more copies that are spread, the less likely a given work will truly vanish from humanity’s history.
The problem is connecting the people who have the files with the people who want copies. I have some weird stuff I’m sure someone might want, but no way to know who.
weird shit
I once found a bunch of the old Disney Nazi propaganda cartoons, wonder if they are still out there
I knew someone who had multiple seasons of both Mr. Rogers and Reading Rainbow!
But I also probably know someone who has Thanos and Fast and Furious.
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I found a bunch of obscure movies from the 1930s and 1940s when a friend asked for some. I’m still seeding them. And I do mean obscure, not like Citizen Kane or something that everyone knows.
There’s a few 90s movie torrents I think I’m the only person left seeding. Things get forgotten about so fast.
Thank you for your service.
The private tracker I use have random stuff like reality shows for Norway television, all the Olympics transmissions, and BlueRay rips of movies from the 30’s. There’s also the popular stuff, but you would be amazed by the random stuff people upload.
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We’re not young people, your original comment is just wrong and makes no sense. Or tells us what YOU preserve.
I don’t think he understands what a joke is
“All these dumb kids don’t get my super great jokes!”
I’m not completely wrong, it’s a joke! Isn’t it funny how I got all of my facts incorrect? Upvotes, please!
You misspelled ignominious in your username.
I know, dude. It’s an inside joke with a friend, if you care.
Wat… The lone seeder is elevated to mythical status in torrent culture. People take great lengths to preserve old content - whether that’s by seedboxing, ripping physical content, or even the more backend stuff like trackers who have entire systems devoted to “reseed requests”.
Deleting a torrent is probably the most heartbreaking thing i can imagine. My most prized possession is a ratio 1.00 torrent from 2014 that was 0.00 until 2021.
Rechecking, it is now at 2.00 which makes me unreasonably happy
Edit for more happiness: A copy of Monkey Shines (1988) that took me about 14 months to download is now at a 2913 ratio (since February)
Lmao I just watched the trailer for Monkey Shines. Rest in peace George, you legend.
The first time I heard about cloud storage, I wondered why anyone would store their stuff with a third party, for reasons EXACTLY like this. This is the exact scenario I thought of.
And while we’re talking about this specific case, presumably all the other customers of that cloud storage company list all their stuff, too.
Using cloud is not the problem here and never has been an issue from a technical design standpoint, it’s having the data only with one cloud provider that allows this to happen.
The only customers of that cloud provider that lost their stuff are the customers that would have lost their stuff using any other method they’d implement, because the only way you can lose your data this way is through poor design.
Risk analysis in IT Management nowadays is spectacularly bad.
If you become dependent on a 3rd supplier then their survival as a company is now a risk for you. It doesn’t matter how good the reliability you have contracted with them - if they go under whatever penalities in the contract for failing to deliver said reliability will never be paid.
You might even be at risk of them simply chosing to close that division - small company signing a service supply contract with a big company: good luck getting a contract where the parent company (rather than whatever paper company they spun up for that business area) actually has to pay you stiff penalties if they fuck you over.
As soon as mission critical anything is outside your company, a lot of otherwise irrelevant things become operational risks for your company.
This is why you don’t put your mission critical anything on an external Cloud supplier.
You know, stuff like the only copy of 70 years of TV history that’s actually just 50TB and would’ve fit a bunch of Hard Disks or Backup tapes.
This is something I kept pointing out to management at my last company, but they were always so hellbent on putting everything in the cloud. Then construction across the street cut some fiber or something going to our building. When I told management that we had no Internet and I was sending everyone home, they lost their shit. I mollified them a bit by pointing out that at least some people would be able to work from home. I then waited until the meeting the next morning to point out that only 1 QA/support person and 1 dev had laptops (because of course management didn’t see any reason to spend the extra money for laptops over desktops). It was also nice to be able to make the CEO and VP to drive all the way home and back to get their wireless data pucks they used as their personal Internet connections.
My overwhelming joy at all the petty little ways I was able to rub their bad decisions in their faces was a big part of what made me actually start hunting for a new job rather than just thinking about it.Yeah, even having learned to explain this shit in the IT Consultancy language of “supply contracts” and “mission critical”, it’s still not guaranteed that I’ll convince a manager to avoid or at least account for the higher exposure to outside risks when subcontracting certain things.
Nowadays, with 3 decades of experience in the Industry, I honestly think that the majority of managers, no matter how high in a company, are either incompetent as fuck or simply manage with as priority maximizing their next bonus in the full knowledge that they’re leaving traps for the next one to solve and if they do blow up during their own time, they’ll still personally end up better off by going for bonus-today-problem-tomorrow than refraining from doing so.
The Peter Principle states that a manager will get promoted to his level of incompetency, then get stuck there. As time goes on, more and more managers reach their level of incompetency, until the entire management level is populated by people who are bad at their jobs.
Say a guy is a great salesman, the best in the company, beats all his targets. He’s just great at it, and all his customers love him. So he gets promoted to sales manager, with a nice office, and a big raise.
But just because he’s a talented salesman, doesn’t mean he knows how to manage sales people. Also, the guy who replaced him isn’t pulling in near the revenue, so the department he’s managing is now WORSE than before he took over. He becomes just another mediocre manager, in over his head, and he never gets another promotion again.
Or maybe he moves up a few more levels, but eventually he hits the point that he can’t do well, and that’s where he remains, being mediocre. After a while, ALL the managers are people who were good at their old jobs, but mediocre at this one, and here they stay, until they are swept out in their 50s.
I think that there are roughly 4 causes:
- As you mentioned, people promoted all the way up to the first position they are truly incompetent at, i.e. the Peter Principle
- Nepotism and cronyism - people are getting the jobs because who they know (i.e. “the old boys network”) or who their family are, not competence.
- People get the job because they’re good at personal image management and social networking - they mingle with the right people and project the right impression with things like speaking in a firm confident manner about things they know nothing about - which are fine skills to have and even applicable to some of the job of management (at the mid and above management levels), just not enough for the rest of the job of management, and that part missing is in most management positions the biggest chunk (and includes the stuff for recognition of risks and accounting for them).
- Upper level managers hire people like themselves to work under them. This partly overlaps with number 2 but goes further. When said upper level management is incompetent because they got in due to one or more of the other 3 problems, they hire people the same profile as themselves even if not due to those reasons directly (a simple example: managers who look and behave posh because they attended a posh private school will tend to hire managers who look the same hence are likely to have attended such schools themselves - this isn’t directly cronyism but ends up producing a similar effect as they’re selecting people from their social domain even if they don’t know them personally)
I would say that nowadays in management the first one is a pretty small fraction of it (except maybe in the less prestigious and less paid low level management positions) because people are rarely “promoted from the ground floor” nowadays and hiring for more prestigious positions is very heavy on the impression people project, so most of the problem are numbers 2 and 3 plus a bit of number 4.
Number 4 is especially pernicious because it means that once an institution is managed at the top level by people who do not recognize the importance of certain skills in management (like caring about and understanding risk analysis) it tends to mainly hire people who are the same for other management positions and even for replacements for the top job - people who don’t think a certain skill or mindset is important for the job are not going to have as a hiring criteria that candidates have such skill or mindset.
Yeah I did risk analysis for 9 years and the job gradually devolved in useless box check-in with people checking nothing, until all of us were laid off and replaced by an AI and a few people in India checking the output. It’s all for show.
According to the article, the data is not clearly lost. It’s that their provider, OSS, had a subcontract with Iron Mountain to host the data storage. When OSS abruptly went defunct, PBS had no direct legal path to access the data in Iron Mountain, and no assurance Iron Mountain would preserve it. It filed the lawsuit to make sure the data was preserved and affirm a legal basis to recover the data.
So the headline’s use of “loses access” is accurate but a little misleading. That said, it is a great argument for reliable data preservation.
Iron Mountain is aware of the situation so ideally they’ve flagged it to avoid the bad press of deleting it.
also why you should have local and remote backups both.
Gotta follow the 3-2-1 rule
Well, yes, but consider that others using the OSS service may not have the resources of PBS to file suit and litigate the issue, and they may well lose their data forever.
The whole company is sketchy
https://web.archive.org/web/20250318131517/https://www.osstorage.com/cloudPricing
There is nothing open source, their address is the iron mountain denver datacenter address
That page looks like it was directly ripped from https://wasabi.com/pricing, including the “Ball appliance” which appears to be a Wasabi-only product. This reeks of “I know a guy who does storage” and it’s just a few open source products bolted to another storage API with upcharging and a corporate website
Good argument to not use the service.
50TB seems very little for 70 years worth of data … I have more than that it it didn’t even take me 4.
Video files only got big in the last decade or so. Lower resolutions are a lot smaller
50TB isn’t even that expensive on a HDD! Couple hundred to a thousand bucks! How much were they paying for that much storage?
it sucks but they didn’t follow the basic 3-2-1 rule of back-ups (3 copies, 2 types of media, 1 off-site)
That’s smart, My last company did 4-3-2-1. When the servers went down all we had was 4 calling birds 3 French hens and 2 turtle doves.
was your last employer a flock of seagulls?
u said flock
I heard about them. They got the five golden rings award
Well, they got the 1 off-site bit…
but it wasn’t even a back-up when they no longer had the original files
Redundancy would have made this a non issue. Even just local cold storage.
50 TB isn’t even that much space, certainly not for a broadcaster. No reason not to have a local copy. 50 PB, I could see a small PBS affiliate not having the resources to manage locally, but you can put 50 TB in consumer-grade NAS.
That’s less storage than my Plex storage. PBS could and should definitely do better.
More specifically, this PBS affiliate (Nine PBS St Louis). It wasn’t PBS proper. This only impacted local programming archives. But that’s still a loss for the local community.
PBS likely does much better than this. Heck, a lot of their stuff is backed up in the Library of Congress.
Either way, like under $2000 would have bought them the storage necessary to keep these backups on-site. They still would’ve needed another backup solution for redundancy purposes, but this wouldn’t be the huge issue it seems to be now, where the data is sort of in limbo.
That’s fair. The point still stands that they should do better.
Agreed. Although sometimes these smaller affiliates don’t have super-seasoned IT talent. The jobs for the department heads at these organizations often make what an intern or college grad would make in the private sector at an unremarkable mid-size tech company.
You often get people making questionable decisions simply because they don’t have seasoned IT people in the building.
All in all, this was dumb, but it also feels like a story I’ve seen before. The nonprofit media isn’t funded, and the cracks are showing.
When I started at my last job, I was fresh out of college, only Best Buy Geek Squad experience, and I was the sole IT guy at the company. All “backups” were shadow copies and VM snapshots. Shadow copies are great for simple accidental deletions, and the VMs would work as a backup 90% of the time, but it was not a valid backup solution. When I left we had onsite backups to hard drives, cloud backup in Azure blob storage, and remote replication geographically distant.
It still could have been better, but it was something. Also, we worked on government contracts and stored confidential and ITAR controlled military and government drawings and data. It was one of those things that I’m absolutely shocked that in my 9+ years there that we never had a major breach or lost any data.
You can put this on 2 HDDs nowadays. This is pathetic.
50T isn’t even that much data anymore. You’re talking about maybe $2k in hard drives.
Refurbished Exos X22 drives with 24GB Capacity cost around 650€ these days, those 2k are the high end even nowadays.
Refurbished
If you’re a multi-billion dollar broadcast parent company doing long term storage for a 70-year archive catalog, you can spring for new. Maybe even go Big Fancy and get some RAID drives and tape backups, for extra redundancy.
In the pre-AI days maybe, today 50TB is expensive due to increasing prices of all computer gear.
today 50TB is expensive
I don’t believe you can go back more than five years and find per-TB rates under the current rate. Ten years is straight out. Twenty years is laughable.
Meanwhile, PBS has an annual operating budget of around $340M. They can afford to manage their own data, at the scale of tens of terrabytes. And I guarantee you that whatever they’re paying Iron Mountain to host the data is multiples the cost of self-hosting.
And they had zero notice?
That’s kind of how bankruptcy works. You can’t give notice that you’re going to be bankrupt. The moment you’d give notice of bankruptcy, everything would collapse anyway as lenders call in debts and customers cancel orders that are now in jeopardy.
Other statuses that exist are examinership (an outside appointee trying to save the company by any means) and receivership (probably the closest to what you’d like - the company is entrusted to a third party to try to pay its debts before it is wound up, usually trying to determine which debts to pay for the greater good, and which ones to default on).
Jesus Christ, what happened to P2P? Just have the files in constant circulation through the world’s computers. And 50TB, while a lot, isn’t beyond the reach of a well-heeled private individual to host on a NAS.
50TB is not a lot, it’s actually a capacity that some homelabers and data hoarders have or surpass.
It’s a lot if you were trying to source the hardware with today’s process, but 5 years ago that would be nothing to an organisation.
It’s a 4-digit number, even today, to build a 50tb local backup box. Absolutely nothing to a company. They were simply lazy and didn’t do the bare minimum.
Or they were sold a bill of goods by a cloud vendor.
No in house backups? Sad.
“But optical discs are an old technology, everyone uses SSDs! Tape drives are even older technology! We need to SSD everything! SSD good! Oh no, why is that external SSD I haven’t powered up for five years and kept important file on it for fast access suddenly died? It was supposed to be the optical CDs that flake off and oxidize in a year or two!”
Well, there are archival grade optical disks for exactly that purpose.
Someone just tell me that there are backups of most of this properly archived somewhere. Just tell me that, I’m not asking if it’s true, I just need someone to say that.
The data is all there, the vendor they were using to manage the storage just went OOB, and they’re not yet being allowed to retrieve it from the vendor’s storage vendor, Iron Mountain:
The lawsuit filed in Denver District Court alleges that the station’s cloud-storage vendor, Open Source Storage, abruptly cut off access to Nine PBS’ data earlier this year without warning. It states OSS, which had a separate relationship with Iron Mountain to provide data storage, went “defunct,” leaving Nine PBS’ archives in a data center operated by Iron Mountain.
Open Source Storage
Anyone heard of this company before? Their name is impossible to search for!
Thanks. This is the latest archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20250328163113/https://www.osstorage.com/
End-to-Endless Digital Storage Solutions
Endless? lmao
Iron Mountain is obviously aware of the situation and probably doesn’t want the bad press of deleting it. PBS just needs the court order that makes them hand the data over. Because PBS isn’t iron mountains client, they can’t hand them the data without a court order.
Likely available on a torrent.
Does the local St. Louis affiliate produce anything that lots of people would want to seed? They look like a smaller affiliate compared to the WGBH and WNETs out there.
I imagine KETC is a really small shop that mostly broadcasts stuff others have made, plus hyper-local content that isn’t expensive to make.
The cloud is just somebody else’s computer.
Hehe. Was just about to post this. Word for word
