Via Insty, I see this interesting report:
Nine PBS in St. Louis had a rolling annual contract with Open Source Storage (OSS), a cloud storage provider, but when the station went to renew the deal earlier this year, OSS didn’t respond.
On the day the contract expired, Nine PBS suddenly lost access to its data without any warning. That’s when staff there realized that OSS’s website was inactive and the state of Colorado listed the company as delinquent.
The station lost access to 50 terabytes of archival materials, which included all of its footage of historical events that have taken place in St. Louis.
Nine PBS sued OSS but paused the lawsuit after it was contacted by a managing partner of a group that had acquired OSS’s assets and revealed that the station’s archive was being held at the Iron Mountain Data Center in Colorado.
After the managing partner stopped replying, Nine PBS contacted Iron Mountain, which initially suggested that it would return the data, until it reversed course and refused to do so because OSS owned “the physical services housing the data.”
….translated, that means, “Unless you pay us jillions of razzbuckniks, we’re going to keep all that lovely data”.
Of course, I think that the amoral assholes who bought Iron Mountain (LOL) and are holding Nine PBS hostage should be impaled on stakes, but that’s neither here nor there.
More interesting is the followup from Driscoll which points out that on the same page there is this article about a 16TB storage unit (cost: about $3 grand), and that with three (okay four) of those, Nine CBS could just have stored all the data themselves. I’m willing to bet that the $12 thousand outlay is considerably less than their lawyers’ bill.
Idiots.
But we can learn from idiots, can’t we?
Lesson learned: Forego the fucking Cloud, and keep your personal data to yourself. Storage is cheap, your data is irreplaceable.
Which reminds me: I need to back up my hard drive. Tonight’s the night, baby.
You can get 100 TB drives.
That’s true, but…
Those drives are solid-state…
And they cost ***forty thousand dollars apiece***.
For Nine PBS that would have been a tax deductible expense, covered by their various income sources.
As for what Iron Mountain wants from Nine PBS, Nine PBS did not make their contract with Iron Mountain, and likely there was no indication that Iron Mountain would step into the shoes of Open Source Storage at any time after they contracted with Open Source Storage. Because of this lack of contract formation between Nine PBS and Iron Mountain, Iron Mountain is an interloper and is holding Nine PBS’s data for ransom, essentially extorting them for the jillions of razzbuckniks they have decided the data is worth.
This should be settled for whatever Nine PBS would have paid Open Source Storage from the time OSS did not collect any fees to the present.
I never call it “the cloud” – it is liberally someone else’s computer and that is what I call it. When you say it like that, then storing anything important there sounds exactly as silly as it is.
You nailed it Vonz! It’s SOMEONE ELSE’S COMPUTER! And how many people just clicked through the agreements to use it? And where is that cloud computer? I backup my data and keep an extra copy with a trusted friend (aside from the porn, that is (just kidding(maybe))). I’m sure not gonna trust Google, Meta or Microcrap with my files!
The stuff I actually NEED, you know, financial records and stuff, can fit on a USB drive. A few excel files and some basic documents. Pictures? Yeah, I’d need to invest pretty heavy but really, if they’re that important then print them out. Other stuff, like titles and birth certs are all paper storage. Subject to fire and flood, of course, but can’t be hacked by the cloud. I just don’t see where personal info requires all that much.
Corporate stuff is a whole different thing. But then again, my give-a-shit is right there at zero. If they decided that paying someone else for storage was better than keeping it in house, well, that’s a management decision. A poor one, but who cares.
A while back Google sent a note that my Gmail account was full and wanted to start charging me for extra storage. Fuck that. I though anything over a certain age was automatically deleted, but guess not. So I spent a day (cause you can’t just select 50k emails and hit delete for some reason) and culled thru until I was at less than 100 emails. Most of it was spam. None of it was needed.
I spend a considerable amount of time keeping as much of the data of the company I work for off “the cloud”. Besides checking after system updates that often default to cloud storage, I order and configure our servers with tape drives and tapes are kept off-site. It’s a constant struggle but it allows us to keep working during internet outages even though most applications will be slugglish as they constantly want to login to the publishers to check licenses.
I fought that battle 5 years ago. And lost.
Guess what. Every suck-ass prediction about being tenant serfs for some cloud provider has come true.
My company “Learship” still doesn’t listen. It would make waves with the higher ups.
Same. Mostly because of the inevitable exploding costs.
But the cloud provider shutting down or locking you out of your data and systems is definitely a risk, though this is the first time I’ve heard about it actually happening.
So many customers decided to move everything to AWS or Azure to save money, without ever thinking a moment about the per request charges, the per megabyte data and storage charges, the recurring fixed charges, etc. etc. etc.
And then they panic when those charges arrive and end up a LOT higher than the cost of hosting everything themselves.
Its why I shit on business leadership in general. Michael Malice (love him/hate him I don’t care) said “The people at the front of the room, are not impressive.” whether teachers/politicians/ or business leaders, and he’s 100% right.
There’s a meeeetooo element to everything in business, it’s not advertised but its 95% more common than someone swimming against the tide. Some CIO gets invited by MS to an all expense paid Pebble Beach outing, to tout the move to the cloud, and all of a sudden you’re going to the cloud. Recurrent costs be damned, capabilities be damned, risks be damned, as long as we’re doing the new thing.
And going back be damned, because that would be admitting that an executive made the wrong decision. Better a shitshow on the ground than an executive looks bad.
I’ve got about 2TB of data that would be irreplaceable if lost and yes, I do use Dropbox to store it. But it resides on the physical nVME drive on my primary system, and backed up on a NAS device in my house as well.
I don’t have an issue with deep cloud storage per se, but only when used as a failsafe in case your in-house backups have been destroyed by a fire, flood, theft, ransomware, etc.
And just 50TB? That’s it?? One of my friend’s movie collection is easily double that if not more. A good enterprise-level NAS would handle that easily at a fraction of the cost.
I keep all of my data on a thumb drive that hangs on a lanyard around my neck, and back it up to two different machines on a near-daily basis. This does two things for me: that data is always available, whether I’m at home on my desktop or in a barroom on my laptop, and if either machine goes The Way Of All Things, I still have the data.
50 TB is well within reach even for home users. I’m not exactly loaded, but my home server (documents, media, and more) has 24 TB of RAID-5 storage across four 8-TB drives that cost me maybe $200-$300 each. I’d be surprised if the rest of the machine (motherboard, CPU, RAM, etc.) added up to $1000 when I pieced it together. It might cost more to build such a rig now that the price of RAM has gone through the stratosphere (mine is running on 32 GB), but it’s still cheaper than having your data held hostage.
Whoever is running IT at that PBS station ought to be horse-whipped, sacked, and never allowed to work in this business again.
Cloud storage is (if encrypted) OK for backups; I have some of my stuff backed up that way. It should NEVER be used for primary storage. This story is a demonstration of what can happen if you do.