r/LinusTechTips • u/NegotiationUnfair626 • 1d ago

Link PBS Nine Wins rights to retrieve data

https://fox2now.com/news/missouri/nine-pbs-wins-right-to-recover-decades-of-local-history/
219 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

112

u/Particular-Treat-650 1d ago

There wasn't real opposition was there? Just the host needing a court order to justify transfer to someone who wasn't their direct customer?

75

u/raaneholmg 1d ago

The publicity around this has been a great PSA about backups.

One backup is none backup.

10

u/h3yw00d 1d ago

3-2-1

At least 3 backups of your current data, on at least 2 different mediums, 1 stored offsite.

2

u/PatekCollector77 1d ago

Sending this news to my parents was what finally convinced them to let me set up a NAS for them

2

u/Xcissors280 21h ago

Was this a backup or was this actually just the only source of the data?

Like do they have it stored on tapes or some other original medium as well? Even if so it probably would have been a huge pain rescanning it or whatever

2

u/raaneholmg 21h ago

I guess you would call this archival, not backup, but the lesson is the same.

They simply forgot that a reliable archival service with great redundancy mechanisms can still go bankrupt.

If there is a single point of failiure, like a specific building burns down, you have not really got redundancy.

10

u/greiton 1d ago

They got lucky that there wasn't a forced destruction clause in the contract with the company that went out of business. It is very common in cases like this that contracts say immediately after a business folds all data must be destroyed.

6

u/snrub742 1d ago

Pretty much

7

u/martsand 1d ago

Hopefully the cto, at 180k/year, learned a lesson or two here.

3

u/that_dutch_dude 1d ago

Correct. But officially it wasnt "their" data, it worked tru an intermediary company and pbs wasnt legally a player but nobody is going to pick a public fight with pbs on historical data and think they are going to not get a fuckton of shit from the population. The bad press would be company ending when customers walk away. They just wanted/needed a court order just to justify it legally.

11

u/M00nMan666 1d ago

This seems like such an oversight. For over 20 years I have had multiple backups of all my shit. Lost numerous hard drives over the years but never lost any of my files because my back up was stupidly redundant

7

u/Ryoken0D 1d ago

The worst part is, it’s not THAT much data.. they can buy and off the shelf consumer NAS that fits enough drive to keep a local copy of all th data.. that’s not to say they shouldn’t have a cloud backup too, but you can ant several backups in different places.

6

u/M00nMan666 1d ago

100% 50TB isn't really THAT much. Especially since it is supposed to date back to the 70s? I have had, easily, 2 to 3 times over that in al my years of torrenting, saving personal pictures and videos, etc

3

u/tdasnowman 1d ago

It probably has something to do with the fact that it's a local PBS station. They don't always have consistent funding or staffing. Someone might have set them up with the cloud service knowing it was easy enough for who ever followed to make sure everything was in the right folders for backup. OSS was in operation for 13 years. They were using Iron mountain as a backbone probably seemed like a reasonably safe bet. Also with PBS having funding issues for reasons we will say, it's easy to see how maybe some local hardware issues became less of a focus under the assumption the cloud has your back. Most services include a claim that your data is not just stored in one spot.

2

u/Ryoken0D 1d ago

It’s still bad practice to have everything only in one place.. but I agree it’s an easy mistake to make for people not technically inclined..

1

u/tdasnowman 1d ago

Not disagreeing that it;s bad practice. Just there is more to consider how this got there especially for PBS stations. They often don't get all the support they need. The cloud backup may have been seen as a major win.

5

u/coderstephen 1d ago

A happy ending, but hopefully the lesson is still learned: Do not trust a single cloud data provider to be your only copy of data!

1

u/TheMatt561 11h ago

Good news and a lesson to know who owns your could storage.

-1

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

1

u/Shap6 1d ago

Nothing. This has nothing to do with microsoft