Im curious why this topic has been popping up in the news. It seems like a bog standard contractor/subcontractor obligation case.
Im curious why this topic has been popping up in the news. It seems like a bog standard contractor/subcontractor obligation case.
If Iron Mountain made a deal with PBS-affiliate, they'd be breaking the terms of the contract with their customer (the fact it is defunct is just an asterisk). If you were an Iron Mountain client and one of your customers made an end run around you to go directly to Iron Mountain because they refused to pay your bill, you'd be pissed at Iron Mountain.
By solving this as they have done, Iron Mountain can assure other clients they will not just let a third person circumvent their clients. They can now say they only did it by a court order even if they were more than willing to accept the asterisk and do it on principle. Everyone is happy. Everyone is whole.
Thats my impression too. Iron mountain is doing exactly what I would want if I had data with them.
If you are wharehousing data, you dont just let your customer's customer come in, look around, and take whatever they want. Even if they have a sob story.
You ask for a court order with specifics.
The initial reporting implied it was some catastrophic data loss, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire. The truth, while concerning, is a lot more boring.
Also some articles and people on social media were unclear that it was just a single PBS station involved, rather than all PBS content. I saw comments that thought that all the archives for Sesame Street were lost.
Apparently PBS doesn't have some kind of massive conglomerate backup or archives of things that its member stations produce. It's up to every station to archive or back up their own stuff. No standardization as to storage formats, NASes, tapes, or anything.
Sometimes things are transmitted in painful ways like rebroadcast in off hours over microwave links between members so they can re-record what they lost.
Plus the endless game of "hey does anyone have that one obscure episode of this one program we made?" to your colleagues...
It's the original torrent network
Archival/secure storage is big business with big liability headaches if you make a bad decisiion.
A non-profit in a deeply unfair situation tugs at the heartstrings.
What is unfair? It seems completely normal and what courts are for sorting out. Iron mountain is acting exactly how I would want them to if they were storing data for me.
If you are wharehousing data, you dont just let your customer's customer come in, look around, and take whatever they want. Even if they have a sob story.
You ask for a court order with specifics.
How about before the company went out of business? Wasn’t there an avenue for the CEO to send a letter to Iron Mountain mapping the data and its owners or make an arrangement to legally transfer the data or something?
It's unfair when you do the best you can and suddenly you have to talk to lawyers.
> It's unfair when you do the best you can and suddenly you have to talk to lawyers.
Well, PBS didn't do the best they could. Aside from the whole "one backup is no backup" problem, they should've immediately made a new backup as soon as Open Source Storage didn't want to renew their contract and stopped responding to them.
That's the most screaming-red, horn-blaring, strobe-flashing warning that they were about to go under and it was the job of the PBS CTO (who makes $180k/yr) to recognise that and respond immediately (i.e., send an intern the nearest Best Buy to buy 70TB of HDDs, they'd probably still have enough space in their bag to do a coffee run on the way back).
> Wasn’t there an avenue for the CEO to send a letter to Iron Mountain mapping the data and its owners or make an arrangement to legally transfer the data or something?
And if they made a mistake in providing the mapping (given they were a company going bankrupt, they might have trouble getting staff to do a complete audit of their customer data)? I would be surprised if the CEO would not be personally on the hook if they violated HIPPA or some other privacy requirement by allowing PBS access to something by accident.
Once a company is in dire straits like this, sussing out problems like this is one of the main purposes of the legal system. Ironically, 70TB of HDDs probably cost less than the first demand letter PBS sent to Iron Mountain.
The middleman fucked PBS, but everyone else is doing the reasonable job provided the lemons they have been given. It doesn't have to be a big deal.
This audience thinks data center operators are Jedi.