alt Hacker NewsJudge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data
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The court got this right. This is when you need a special master to help with cleanup after a bankruptcy.
We saw something like this when TechShop went bankrupt, with member property in storage on the premises. The bankruptcy trustee set up a procedure where former members could make an appointment to retrieve their property, escorted by a representative of the trustee. Huge pain, but necessary.
Open Source Storage (OSS), the vendor in question, was around for two decades before going out of business last year. The first and last archived versions of its web site:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040628023451/https://www.ossto...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250329140721/https://www.ossto...
(The first version isn't too exciting. It's a broken Flash site.)
Earlier coverage (St. Louis KETC / Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain for data access):
"Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285418>
This is working out largely as I'd suggested it should, albeit with a court's intervention. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293058>.
I'd still argue that I.M. should have anticipated this situation, and have some process in place to address it. "See a court" might well be part of that process.
The ruling seems fair and reasonable, and I'm surprised they couldn't come to the same conclusion without a court.
I previously commented on this when a different, earlier news article and it wasn't clear at the time if the storage company was a colocation customer, or a dedicated server customer of Iron Mountain:
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(from 4 days ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293326
The news article is really not clear about whether this was, relative to the company "OSS":
a) OSS is a colocation customer with its own hardware colocating it inside an Iron Mountain datacenter. In which OSS owned the bare metal and paid iron mountain for rack space and power.
or
b) OSS is a dedicated hardware customer of Iron Mountain running a service on bare metal owned by Iron Mountain, and has gone defunct, leaving behind a bunch of servers/storage arrays that would in normal circumstances get wiped/reprovisioned.
From the point of view of a customer of OSS (PBS), that's two extremely different things.
If it's scenario A, I don't see how PBS has any claim against Iron Mountain. Your typical datacenter colo host for bare metal hardware owned by a customer has no involvement whatsoever in the condition or operation of the data, operating system, filesystems, RAID arrays, ZFS, etc of how the customer has set up their environment. Nor any ability to do anything with it. A colocation host that hasn't been paid for its rack space and power will typically have clauses in its colo contracts allowing for seizure and sale of abandoned hardware after a certain period of time.
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New commentary:
The new news article seems to shed a bit more light on it, it sounds like it's scenario B, in which OSS never owned the hardware (they just set up the operating system/software config on it), and was renting it from Iron Mountain. In this scenario it's much more realistic to expect to be able to get some data back. And as the new news article says, PBS is paying all of the overdue bills in order to be able to do so.
Ordinarily a dedicated server provider that is renting rackmount bare metal hardware to people has a very automated and fast re-provisioning process, if you don't pay your bill, the terms of the contract let them wipe the servers within a fairly short amount of time and reallocat them to new customers.
Now if it had been scenario A, I think that there would have been very little opportunity for judicial remedy in an order requiring Iron Mountain to do anything, because Iron Mountain would have had no control over what a failing/bankrupt/dead colocation customer did with the data on their servers. PBS might have had a claim against the principals of the OSS company, but then you get into the "blood from a stone" problem of trying to enforce a judgment against people who have no assets or ability to pay.
Im curious why this topic has been popping up in the news. It seems like a bog standard contractor/subcontractor obligation case.
> These archives represent an important part of our region’s history, and we look forward to ensuring their preservation and protection through the Court-approved process.
Apparently you didn't find them important enough to have backups. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in net income and they couldn't afford a cheap NAS with 4 disks. Incredible.
I think stories like these highlight the need for clearer (not necessarily more) regulations around contractor/subcontractor/client relationships and what happens when one of them goes tits up.
There were rampant issues in the fintech world that exploded when Synapse, a banking as a service provider, went bankrupt and their ledger didn't match what partner banks had in their accounts. End users were told "your deposits are FDIC insured", but in bankruptcy court the judge was sort of at a loss over how to rectify things - the banks weren't insolvent, and the FDIC (rightfully) said "hey, this isn't our problem, our regulated entities are in compliance". Looks like a similar situation happened here, where the contractors are both doing the "not it" thing.
I feel like a lot of tech innovation and "business process innovation" over the past 15 years was just ignoring regulations that were built up over decades, only discovering the reasons for those regulations when the tide went out and seeing that lots of companies had been pantsless the whole time.