Judge Orders Iron Mountain to Hand Over PBS Archive Devices

Nine PBS, a St. Louis public television station, has been ordered by a judge to take possession of physical devices holding its 70-year digital archive, following a legal dispute with data center provider Iron Mountain. The ruling, issued on August 12, 2026, marks a significant step in the station's effort to recover over 50 terabytes of irreplaceable cultural and historical materials that became inaccessible after its cloud storage vendor, Open Source Storage (OSS), went defunct.

The conflict began in March 2026 when Nine PBS lost access to its data on the contract expiration date of March 6. The station had been a client of OSS since 2019 and had attempted to renew its agreement, but the company became unresponsive. Upon discovering OSS's website was inactive and the company was listed as delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State, Nine PBS learned its data was physically hosted at an Iron Mountain facility in Denver under a separate contract between OSS and Iron Mountain.

After initial attempts to retrieve the data directly were unsuccessful, Nine PBS filed a lawsuit against Iron Mountain in Denver District Court on July 28, 2026. The station argued that Iron Mountain...