St. Louis public television station Nine PBS filed a lawsuit in Denver District Court on July 28 against data center provider Iron Mountain Data Centers to recover 50TB of data, including digital files dating back 70 years, after its cloud storage provider went unresponsive.
The Collapse of Open Source Storage and the Missing Archive
Nine PBS relied on cloud storage provider Open Source Storage (OSS) to manage its historical video assets. According to reporting from trade publication Current, the partnership hit a wall when the station prepared to renew its contract on March 6, 2026. OSS stopped answering communications, and the station’s access to its data was abruptly cut off.
Subsequent investigation revealed that the OSS website had vanished entirely. Furthermore, state records showed the company was listed as delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State. As reported by The Denver Post, the trapped 50TB archive encompasses more than 11,000 distinct files. These assets include local coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, historical documents detailing East St. Louis, and footage of The Great Flood of 1993.
Leah Freeman, Nine PBS’ vice president and chief content officer, told Current that the collection represents “70 years of our organization’s history.”
Infrastructure Realities Versus Custodial Access
The operational bottleneck centers on physical hardware housed inside an enterprise facility. OSS utilized an Iron Mountain data center in Denver to store the broadcaster’s data. When Nine PBS attempted to secure its files, Iron Mountain refused to release the hardware or data directly to the station.
Iron Mountain defended its posture by drawing a strict line between physical real estate and client-managed data payloads. A company spokesperson explained the foundational limits of its services:
“Our customers rent space for their servers and other hardware. These are the client’s assets. We don’t have access to the data on the hardware/servers because they belong to our customers.”
The facility operator argued that handing over equipment without a court order would violate basic data privacy protocols, breach its contract with OSS, and “potentially [expose] confidential data belonging to other clients of OSS.”
Judicial Intervention and the Path to Retrieval
Legal maneuvering has accelerated through the Colorado court system. A judge blocked Iron Mountain from deleting or modifying the data. During a court hearing on Wednesday, the presiding judge ruled that Iron Mountain must hand over any physical devices holding the data.
The ruling establishes strict operational boundaries for data extraction. Nine PBS must find a third party, such as a former OSS worker, who can help retrieve the data within 30 days and without sharing or corrupting data belonging to other OSS clients.
Nine PBS is already communicating with a former OSS employee “who is willing to help.” The court instructed both Nine PBS and Iron Mountain to provide updates by September 14. If technical roadblocks emerge, such as from the data being encrypted, another hearing will be scheduled.
