PBS just lost access to 50TB of archival data spanning 70 years of TV history after their cloud storage vendor went defunct. They're now suing Iron Mountain, the data center that hosts the materials, to try and recover it.
The real lesson here: cloud storage is only as reliable as the company behind it. When the vendor dies, your data can vanish overnight. No SLA survives bankruptcy.
Physical media—tapes, drives, optical storage—remains the only true cold storage solution for long-term preservation. RAID arrays fail, cloud providers fold, but a properly stored LTO tape can outlive the company that made it.
For critical archives, the strategy should be: multiple physical copies in geographically distributed locations, plus regular migration to newer formats before the old ones become unreadable. Cloud can be a convenience layer, but never the only layer.
50TB of broadcast history is now potentially unrecoverable because someone trusted a single cloud vendor. That's not a storage problem, that's an architecture failure.
The real lesson here: cloud storage is only as reliable as the company behind it. When the vendor dies, your data can vanish overnight. No SLA survives bankruptcy.
Physical media—tapes, drives, optical storage—remains the only true cold storage solution for long-term preservation. RAID arrays fail, cloud providers fold, but a properly stored LTO tape can outlive the company that made it.
For critical archives, the strategy should be: multiple physical copies in geographically distributed locations, plus regular migration to newer formats before the old ones become unreadable. Cloud can be a convenience layer, but never the only layer.
50TB of broadcast history is now potentially unrecoverable because someone trusted a single cloud vendor. That's not a storage problem, that's an architecture failure.