Nine PBS has filed a lawsuit after losing access to more than 50TB of programming and archival material covering roughly 70 years of television history.
The St. Louis PBS affiliate sued Iron Mountain Data Centers on July 28 after its cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), apparently went out of business. Nine PBS says its archive remains stored at an Iron Mountain facility in Denver but cannot currently be retrieved.
The collection includes television programs, photographs, and videos dating back to the station’s launch in 1954. It also contains historically significant coverage of events including the Great Flood of 1993, the pandemic, and the history of East St. Louis.
Nine PBS had used OSS and its predecessor for storage services since 2019. When the station attempted to renew its agreement in February 2026, it reportedly received no response. Access to the archive was then cut off when the contract expired on March 6, despite provisions allowing the station additional time to retrieve its data.
Nine PBS later discovered that OSS’s website had disappeared and the company was listed as delinquent by the Colorado Secretary of State.
The station successfully sued OSS and obtained a judgment confirming that Nine PBS owned the files and had the right to recover them. Iron Mountain subsequently confirmed that it possessed the data but reportedly declined to release it because OSS owns the physical equipment on which the files are stored.
Nine PBS is now suing Iron Mountain to prevent the archive from being deleted, altered, or overwritten while the dispute is resolved.
The station says recovering the collection is crucial because it represents decades of historically important material documenting St. Louis and the surrounding region.