Nine PBS is afraid that it will lose over 70 years of archival materials and programming after its contracted cloud storage vendor has apparently gone out of business. According to Current, the channel used Open Source Storage, or OSS, for storing over 50TB of data — but it suddenly lost access to its data earlier this year. Nine PBS has been working with OSS and its predecessor since 2019 and intended to renew its contract on March 6 of this year. The company never responded and abruptly cut off the station’s data access even though it still had 30 days to retrieve its data after the contract ended.

The station dug a little bit deeper when it discovered that the OSS website no longer existed and was listed as delinquent under the Colorado Secretary of State. It also discovered that OSS utilized Iron Mountain’s services, so it sent a demand letter to the latter to preserve its data and to “pay any reasonable costs associated with its demand.” At the time, Iron Mountain did not confirm or deny that it possessed Nine PBS’ data.

  • village604@adultswim.fan
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    9 days ago

    It’s safe if you’re following proper backup procedures.

    3 backups in 2 different forms of media with 1 being off-site

    A single point of failure is always a bad thing.

    • Carl@anarchist.nexus
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      9 days ago

      Yeah, the cloud makes proper 3-2-1 backups easier, *but you still need to take care of the rest of the 3-2-1. The cloud takes care of a third of the 3, half of the 2, and satisfies the 1. But it’s not a complete 3-2-1 backup by itself, and anyone selling it as such is blowing smoke up your ass to get a sale.

      • village604@adultswim.fan
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        9 days ago

        If done right, a third party could do 3-2-1 for you.

        But unlike in this case, to do it right your clients need to know where the data is stored, and any 3rd party you contract with should have a clause that establishes your client as the data owner (as well as requirements for data return if the business closes).

        This would have been easily avoidable, most likely if IT was allowed to be part of the contracting discussion.

        • pwnicholson@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          A single place can’t do 3-2-1. That’s not “3” (just a single company = single point of failure, as demonstrated here)

            • pwnicholson@lemmy.world
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              8 days ago

              I did. Did you not read mine? If a single 3rd party entity is setting up all your backups, then that single entity still controls your destiny. That’s still a bad idea.

              • village604@adultswim.fan
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                8 days ago

                So you didn’t read my comment, because I already addressed all of your points.

                I literally stated how to prevent what happened here.

    • Bluegrass_Addict@lemmy.ca
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      9 days ago

      no it’s not… you’re thinking of stuff being restored but that doesn’t account for neglect and straight up theft of your information from these unsecure criminal companies like microslop

      • Aussiemandeus@aussie.zone
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        9 days ago

        Not to mention Microsoft has 400 forced copies of the same useless thing for work saved on multiple desktops that are not on my damn computer and need to be downloaded.

        Fuck it shits me

      • village604@adultswim.fan
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        9 days ago

        That’s a different conversation.

        But you can encrypt at rest the data you store in the cloud (with keys your provider doesn’t have) without a lot of trouble.