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.