PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation
www.tomshardware.com
This wouldn't have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and populated it with a few hard drives.
  • Carl@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    7·
    8 hours ago

    It’s interesting that the data center still physically has the data, but is refusing to let PBS access it because PBS wasn’t the customer. The (now defunct) data management company was technically the data center’s customer, so PBS is basically going to have to get a court order to tell the data center that PBS owns the data.

    But also, this is exactly why proper 3-2-1 backups should be the norm. PBS spent millions on backups with this data management company… But didn’t think to have a few HDD’s in a NAS, somewhere in one of their equipment racks?

    Even an off-the-shelf unit like a Buffalo 12-drive rack-mount NAS would have been fine. Set it in RAID-6, and you get 100TB of storage with tolerance for two drive failures. Especially if they built it years ago (when they were initially contracting with the data management company, before the current memory shortage issues). It would be easy to bake into the existing quote, and would have dramatically improved their quality of life surrounding backups, because they could simply have the cloud service periodically mirror the NAS. So you’re not reliant on external Internet access for every single file transfer. Employees simply use the NAS, and the backups take care of themselves from there.

    In fact, I’d argue that the data management company was negligent in not incorporating an on-site backup solution as part of the million dollar contract. It would have been a drop in the bucket for a contract like that. Especially since the on-site backup would have improved resiliency for things like internet outages, and could be put on a UPS to withstand power flickers.