Comment by Barbing
16 hours ago
How about before the company went out of business? Wasn’t there an avenue for the CEO to send a letter to Iron Mountain mapping the data and its owners or make an arrangement to legally transfer the data or something?
It's unfair when you do the best you can and suddenly you have to talk to lawyers.
> It's unfair when you do the best you can and suddenly you have to talk to lawyers.
Well, PBS didn't do the best they could. Aside from the whole "one backup is no backup" problem, they should've immediately made a new backup as soon as Open Source Storage didn't want to renew their contract and stopped responding to them.
That's the most screaming-red, horn-blaring, strobe-flashing warning that they were about to go under and it was the job of the PBS CTO (who makes $180k/yr) to recognise that and respond immediately (i.e., send an intern the nearest Best Buy to buy 70TB of HDDs, they'd probably still have enough space in their bag to do a coffee run on the way back).
> Wasn’t there an avenue for the CEO to send a letter to Iron Mountain mapping the data and its owners or make an arrangement to legally transfer the data or something?
And if they made a mistake in providing the mapping (given they were a company going bankrupt, they might have trouble getting staff to do a complete audit of their customer data)? I would be surprised if the CEO would not be personally on the hook if they violated HIPPA or some other privacy requirement by allowing PBS access to something by accident.
Once a company is in dire straits like this, sussing out problems like this is one of the main purposes of the legal system. Ironically, 70TB of HDDs probably cost less than the first demand letter PBS sent to Iron Mountain.
This is so much their own damn fault. I have no idea what level of utter incompetency it takes to think that a cloud storage system is a safe way to store the only copy of your data. And as you said, on top of that all the warning signs were there that you need to take a backup right away.
Holy hell, I wanted to see them get this suit dismissed just to rub it into their faces what mindless idiots were in charge of this fiasco.
The middleman fucked PBS, but everyone else is doing the reasonable job provided the lemons they have been given. It doesn't have to be a big deal.