A St. Louis PBS station is suing a data center provider to rescue a 70-year archive. Nine PBS, a PBS station in St. Louis, Missouri, sued data center company Iron Mountain in July to gain access to an archive of 70 years' worth of cultural artifacts. The station filed its lawsuit after Iron Mountain allegedly refused to hand over data it hosted on behalf of Nine PBS's now defunct cloud service provider Open Source Storage (OSS).

The trapped archive includes TV shows, videos, photos and other digital cultural objects relevant to St. Louis' history. In March, Nine PBS learned that Open Source Storage wasn't renewing its contract, but rather than give the station 30 days to retrieve the archive, the company cut off access immediately. After the owner left, the station turned to Iron Mountain, which physically hosted the data. Iron Mountain refused to hand over the data since its contract is technically with OSS.

In a hearing on Wednesday, a judge ordered Iron Mountain to cooperate with Nine PBS to retrieve the data. The judge ruled that the station must identify a third-party vendor to help access the data from Iron Mountain's data center. "We appreciate the Court's thoughtful decision establishing a path forward to access and recover our archival materials," Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman told Current.

While Nine PBS is now on its way to hopefully saving its digital archive, much of this drama could have been avoided with a safer approach to data storage. The most common recommendation is the "3-2-1 rule": keep three copies of each file across two different mediums, with one copy kept offsite.