Judge Orders Iron Mountain to Surrender Hardware Storing 50TB of St. Louis Public TV Archives

St. Louis public television station Nine PBS has secured a judicial order compelling Iron Mountain Data Centers to surrender physical servers housing 50 terabytes of archival media following the collapse of cloud storage vendor Open Source Storage.

The ruling in Denver District Court creates a structured mechanism for the broadcaster to recover 70 years of historical media. Under the directive issued by the court, Nine PBS has a 30-day timeline to hire an independent technical consultant—potentially a former Open Source Storage employee—to retrieve the media files directly from the physical hardware without compromising or exposing data belonging to other customers, as reported by Ars Technica.

Nine PBS initially initiated legal action against Iron Mountain on July 28 after losing access to more than 11,000 digital files maintained in a Denver data center facility. The station's digital collection includes irreplaceable regional historical media, such as local reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic, documentation of East St. Louis history, and footage covering the Great Flood of 1993. A judge previously entered an injunction preventing Iron Mountain from erasing or altering the media.

The legal battle followed the breakdown of Nine PBS’s relationship with Open Source Storage, which provided cloud, software, and hardware services to the station. When Nine PBS’s contract ended on March 6, the broadcaster was unable to secure a renewal agreement despite reaching out in February. Although the contract contained a 30-day window to offload stored assets, access was severed immediately upon expiration. State corporate records show Open Source Storage, established in 2021, has fallen into delinquent status with the Colorado Secretary of State and halted operations.

Prior to going silent, James Tramel, identified in court documents as a managing partner of an entity that acquired assets from Open Source Storage, informed Nine PBS that its data resided at Iron Mountain’s facility. Tramel later cut off communications after claiming during a phone call that he had been defrauded into purchasing the storage business. Nine PBS subsequently obtained a default judgment against Open Source Storage in St. Louis Circuit Court confirming its ownership rights to the assets, though the defunct vendor failed to return the files.

Iron Mountain, which declined an offer from Nine PBS in March to cover data recovery expenses, maintained that it could not release physical servers without explicit judicial approval. The infrastructure operator clarified that its contract was solely with Open Source Storage and that it only supplies physical colocation space, power, cooling, and connectivity. Iron Mountain stated that providing unapproved physical access to third parties would violate standard privacy protocols and risk exposing confidential data belonging to other clients sharing the infrastructure.

Nine PBS is currently in discussions with a former Open Source Storage employee who has expressed willingness to assist with the server extraction ahead of a court-mandated progress report due September 14. In a statement, Leah Freeman, vice president and chief communications officer at Nine PBS, expressed gratitude for the court's decision, noting that the approved retrieval framework will allow the public broadcaster to preserve and protect historical regional archives that belong to its community.