Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data

1. Court involvement provides legal cover

A court is needed for cover since it is possible that sometimes else's data will be seen or even corrupted in the process. This way they can say they were doing what the court asked for.
‑ bluGill

Having a court decision and court‑set procedures that essentially force them to participate and also establishes third‑party review of the data will give them some cover if one of those other clients of the now‑defunct OSS discovers that Nine PBS accessed or inadvertently retained their data.
‑ jtsummers

It’s likely that Iron Mountain needed a court order in order to do this with legal cover.
‑ mikeryan

2. Mixed‑client data makes retrieval difficult

I doubt Iron Mountain actually objected to giving the data, but in the end it probably wasn’t in a position to know what data belonged to PBS and what belonged to other clients of OSS and you'd get very worried if a data storage company gave a company's data to someone else without authorization.
‑ trebligdivad

It’s just a data warehouse and OSS likely had multiple clients’ data and backups. Iron Mountain can’t let one third party go searching through a defunct customer’s stuff that has a bunch of additional third parties’ property intermingled with it. Too many unknowns and potentially litigious third parties.
‑ mikeryan

3. Poor backup practices and vendor accountability

I have to agree with GP here, this is pretty incredible. They contracted with a vendor to store their data, not to back it up. It's not a backup if you can lose it in the same instant you lose the data.
‑ aaronmdjones

Apparently you didn’t find them important enough to have backups. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in net income and they couldn’t afford a cheap NAS with 4 disks.
‑ Magicrafter13