Tech and AI

Fifty terabytes of a broadcaster's archive sit in a data centre nobody will unlock

By Staff Writer  |  16 August 2026

A public television station in St Louis lost access to seventy years of its own recordings when its storage supplier stopped answering the telephone. The files were never lost. They are in a Denver facility whose operator says its customer was the supplier, not the station.

Nine PBS, the public television station in St Louis, has been in court since the spring trying to get back more than fifty terabytes of its own archive. The material covers more than seventy years and includes the station's coverage of East St Louis, of the coronavirus pandemic and of the Great Flood of 1993. Nobody suggests the files have been destroyed. The station simply cannot reach them.

The sequence is worth setting out in order, because every step of it is open to any organisation keeping records on somebody else's hardware.

How access disappeared

In 2019 the station entered into an agreement with a company that later traded as Open Source Storage, for hardware, software and cloud storage. The contract was renewed each year. In February the station tried to arrange a meeting about renewing again and heard nothing back. The agreement was due to expire on 6 March and gave the station thirty days after termination to retrieve its data. On 6 March, according to the complaint, access was cut off without warning and the thirty days never ran.

When the station went looking for the supplier it found the website gone and the company delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State. It eventually established that its data was sitting in a Denver data centre operated by Iron Mountain, and wrote to that company on 13 March asking it to preserve and return the archive, offering to pay the cost. The reply neither confirmed nor denied that the material was there.

The station is not in dispute with the company holding its data. It is in dispute with a company that will not release it, because the rack the data sits on belonged to somebody else.

Two lawsuits and a vanishing counterparty

The station sued the storage supplier and its purported president in Missouri in April. It paused that case when a man who described himself as a managing partner of a group that had acquired the supplier's assets confirmed the data was safe in Denver. About a month later he stopped responding, an automatic reply said he was no longer connected with the company, and he later told the station by telephone that he had been defrauded into buying it and that it had reverted to its former owners.

The station obtained a default judgment. The Missouri court found that it owned the data and had an immediate right to possess it, and ordered the supplier to return it or to arrange its transfer to another vendor. That judgment did not move the data one inch, because the company it binds is not the company holding the servers.

So the station sued again, this time in Denver, and asked the court to stop the data centre operator deleting, modifying or overwriting anything while the dispute proceeds. A judge granted that relief. The station says the operator acknowledged holding the material and at first indicated it would comply, then declined, on the ground that its own customer owned the infrastructure the data sits on.

We appreciate the Court's thoughtful decision establishing a path forward to access and recover our archival materials, which the Court confirmed that Nine PBS rightfully owns

Leah Freeman, Vice President and Chief Communications Officer, Nine PBS

The clause that was not there

For anyone holding project records, drawings, models or correspondence on a third party platform, the useful part is the shape of the gap rather than the drama. The station had a retrieval period. What it did not have was any relationship with the company physically holding the equipment, and no way of asserting one when its supplier stopped existing in any practical sense.

Three questions come out of it and none are expensive to ask. Where is the data physically held, and under whose name is that facility contracted. What happens to a retrieval right when the counterparty is dissolved or simply unreachable. And is there any provision letting the customer deal directly with the underlying facility, or with an insolvency office holder, without a fresh court order somewhere it has never traded.

Construction and engineering businesses now carry retention obligations measured in decades, and a fair number of them have moved their older material onto storage arrangements they have never read closely. The station's files were never at risk from a fire, a flood or a dead hard drive. They were put out of reach by a company register entry.

Seventy years of recordings, intact, in a building the station has no contract with, behind a dispute nobody can settle quickly.