Technology

Piracy is media preservation

According to the article, the data is not clearly lost. It's that their provider, OSS, had a subcontract with Iron Mountain to host the data storage. When OSS abruptly went defunct, PBS had no direct legal path to access the data in Iron Mountain, and no assurance Iron Mountain would preserve it. It filed the lawsuit to make sure the data was preserved and affirm a legal basis to recover the data.

So the headline's use of "loses access" is accurate but a little misleading. That said, it is a great argument for reliable data preservation.

Redundancy would have made this a non issue. Even just local cold storage.

it sucks but they didn't follow the basic 3-2-1 rule of back-ups (3 copies, 2 types of media, 1 off-site)

And they had zero notice?

Someone just tell me that there are backups of most of this properly archived somewhere. Just tell me that, I'm not asking if it's true, I just need someone to say that.

The cloud is just somebody else's computer.

Risk analysis in IT Management nowadays is spectacularly bad.

If you become dependent on a 3rd supplier then their survival as a company is now a risk for you. It doesn't matter how good the reliability you have contracted with them - if they go under whatever penalities in the contract for failing to deliver said reliability will never be paid.

You might even be at risk of them simply chosing to close that division - small company signing a service supply contract with a big company: good luck getting a contract where the parent company (rather than whatever paper company they spun up for that business area) actually has to pay you stiff penalties if they fuck you over.

As soon as mission critical anything is outside your company, a lot of otherwise irrelevant things become operational risks for your company.

This is why you don't put your mission critical anything on an external Cloud supplier.

You know, stuff like the only copy of 70 years of TV history that's actually just 50TB and would've fit a bunch of Hard Disks or Backup tapes.

Data you only have one copy of is data you don't mind losing.

This looks like this is isolated to KETC’s locally produced shows for Missouri. They appear to be a smaller affiliate and they don’t make a ton of stuff that contributes to national and international broadcasts.

Since they have a smaller audience I imagine it’s going to be harder for KETC to find community-created backups of their stuff.

I also imagine that if Missouri gave more of a shit about public broadcasting, this affiliate would be operating with better funded / more experienced IT staff. These little affiliates really rely on a lot of volunteers and green IT folks who do the work for the experience.

Jesus Christ, what happened to P2P? Just have the files in constant circulation through the world's computers. And 50TB, while a lot, isn't beyond the reach of a well-heeled private individual to host on a NAS.

The first time I heard about cloud storage, I wondered why anyone would store their stuff with a third party, for reasons EXACTLY like this. This is the exact scenario I thought of.

And while we're talking about this specific case, presumably all the other customers of that cloud storage company list all their stuff, too.

Aw, that's sad. I loved Mr. Rogers and Dragon Tales.

Fuck cloud storage.

50TB seems very little for 70 years worth of data ... I have more than that it it didn't even take me 4.

I know Wikimedia is getting deserved shit for what they're doing now, but allowing anyone to download the entire shebang means it's far less likely it will be lost in the future.

If PBS wasn't forced to make money they could have done the same with their content. The only reason they needed to control it was because they needed to sell it.