PBS fears losing 50TB of data after being ghosted by cloud storage provider

The submitter editorialized the headline. This is about Nine PBS, not PBS, which is a specific PBS station not the overall organization known as PBS. And this article is now 10 days old, and published after a resolution was settled on. The work still has to be done, but they're getting access to their data if it can be retrieved.

https://current.org/2026/08/judge-sets-framework-for-nine-pb... - Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49333344

What kills me about this is that 50 TB isn't actually that much data, and they could have pretty easily had a first-party, offline backup of this. You can buy a 16 TB hard disk for <$700 on Newegg (even with the storage price increases), and any halfway-decent IT person could have set up their own storage backup server with a ZFS pool on commodity hardware within a day or two. That's probably, all in, probably under <$3k in hardware and a bit of labor to have a local redundant backup (of cold, rarely accessed media) for everything before they uploaded it to the cloud that would have de-risked this whole situation enormously.

HN title is inaccurate - article is about a single local PBS station, not PBS the national broadcast network. (Source title is unambiguous)

I know this has been posted a few times but execs need to learn “cloud” is just someone else’s storage they control. If the data is critical it can’t be in the cloud only.