Comment by scosman
10 hours ago
> William Cravens, the attorney representing Iron Mountain, told the judge his client doesn’t know the format of Nine PBS’ materials that were stored by OSS. He expressed concern about whether Nine PBS’ archival material is lumped together with data from other OSS clients. Iron Mountain wants to avoid potentially corrupting the other data, Cravens added.
> Elliff ordered the immediate return of any physical devices that hold Nine PBS’ data once access to OSS’ storage system is granted…
> Once Nine PBS retrieves its data, the station must work with a third party to ensure that no data from other OSS customers is among those materials.
I don’t love this call. Handing over any disk has several problems. It could easily contain very sensitive data from another client. It’s inherently one-sided (another client can’t make the same request if the disk is already gone). And it’s being handed over to a PBS station that doesn’t seem to have the technical chops to manage data backups/security.
I want them to get their data back, but this needs a technical intermediary that handles all client data equally.
Is that statement by Iron Mountain's attorney believable, though?
If cage or server access was shared between Iron Mountain customers, how can Iron Mountain not have a record of what's in what cage or what's on what server?
If Iron Mountain customers like OSS were free to add or remove things without Iron Mountain's knowledge, then their (OSS's) access would've been limited to cages or servers dedicated to their (OSS's) own clients' data. Allowing an OSS ex-employee the same access they previously would've had should be a non-issue, from Iron Mountain's perspective.
What iron mountain does know is which drives are owned by oss. What they don't know is which drives owned by oss have the station's data on them. Hopefully nothing is comingled and drives are dedicated to a customer. Seemingly only oss knows and they went bankrupt so who knows what shape the records are in.