Iron Mountain Data Centers has been sued by US TV station Nine PBS, which is seeking to recover 50TB of data containing some 70 years of programming stored in the cloud.

The St Louis-based public service broadcaster wants to regain access to its data, which is apparently on servers located in one of Iron Mountain’s data centers in Denver.

In a lawsuit filed on July 28 at Denver District Court, Nine PBS says its cloud storage vendor, Open Source Storage (OSS), cut off its access to the information earlier this year, having “gone defunct."

OSS operated out of the Iron Mountain data center, meaning its servers are within the facility. The lawsuit said Iron Mountain had declined to provide Nine PBS with access to its information because the data center firm does not own or operate the hardware.

Nine PBS has been granted a temporary order preventing Iron Mountain from deleting, modifying, or overwriting the materials on the servers. The order directs Iron Mountain to help Nine PBS recover its data from OSS.

In comments to broadcast industry outlet Current, which first reported the news, Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman said the data contains archival materials and programming spanning “70 years of our organization’s history.”

“We are committed to ensuring we can recover and restore full access to this valuable content, which Nine PBS rightfully owns, as it holds significant historical importance for St. Louis,” Freeman said.

Footage that is included in the archive includes material shot during the Covid-19 pandemic and the great flood of 1993, which saw the Mississippi and Missouri rivers burst their banks, killing 50 people and causing billions of dollars worth of damage.

According to court documents, Nine PBS had an annual contract for cloud storage with OSS, but realized something had gone awry when it tried to renew its deal earlier this year and received no response from the company.

Having established that the firm had apparently gone out of business, Nine PBS made several attempts to retrieve its data from various people associated with OSS, without success. It contacted Iron Mountain directly, but the firm declined to hand over the information.

According to its LinkedIn page, OSS was founded in 2004 in Colorado, offering a range of cloud hosting and storage services. Its website is offline.

Iron Mountain operates one data center in Denver, DEN-1, which it acquired in 2017 when it purchased Mag Datacenters, the operator of colocation business Fortrust, for $128 million.

A company statement said: "Iron Mountain never had access to Nine PBS' data. Iron Mountain provides physical infrastructure - the building, network connectivity, power, environmental controls. Our customers rent space for their servers and other hardware. These are the customers' assets. We don't have access to the data on the hardware/servers because they belong to our customers. In this case, OSS. Granting unauthorized access to third-party hardware without a court order would have violated basic data privacy protocols, breached our contractual commitments to OSS, and potentially exposed confidential data belonging to other clients of OSS.

"Iron Mountain has acted appropriately and responsibly at every step to safeguard customer data and honor our contractual commitments to OSS. Throughout this process, we have been transparent with Nine PBS about our role in this dispute, that we do not have access to their data, and we have made consistent efforts to help them resolve the issue."