The part that gets me isn’t the missing backup. It’s that Nine PBS’s 50 terabytes are sitting intact in an Iron Mountain data center and nobody is allowed to touch them, because the provider they paid went insolvent and the data legally sits with OSS. That’s not a hardware failure. It’s a contract failure that behaves exactly like one.
So the question I’m asking about my own storage isn’t “is it replicated” but “who has to still exist for me to read this.” If the answer is a company, that’s a dependency, not a backup. I’d rather have a slow local copy I can walk to than a fast remote one gated by someone else’s solvency.
The story — Non-commercial broadcaster Nine PBS in St. Louis lost access to roughly 50 terabytes of archive material spanning 70 years after its provider Open Source Storage went insolvent. The data physically sits at Iron Mountain, which says it only offers “housing” and believes the data legally belongs to OSS. A Denver judge ordered the parties to cooperate within 30 days. (Source)