Piracy is media preservation
I plead the fifth on that. But how come no backup on this. I am pretty sure they could got at least 50 people to get 1 tb hard drives so their data wouldn’t go this route. And probably more since PBS shaped whole generations of kids and adults into better people.
15x8TB drives gives you about 72TB in raidz2, for about £4k in disks, add a server for say £2k
So by not spending £6k they lost everything, they spent $19million on IT in 2025
Someone fucked up
A tiny PBS office in St Louis has a $19 million/year IT budget? I really doubt that.
I’m having a vague memory of some (cartoon) creator or artist who was thankful to torrents because the show that was the cornerstone of their “portfolio” got delisted from a streaming platform’s catalog.
Is this true?
Iirc is “The Owl House”
50TB isn’t even that expensive on a HDD! Couple hundred to a thousand bucks! How much were they paying for that much storage?
Risk analysis in IT Management nowadays is spectacularly bad.
If you become dependent on a 3rd supplier then their survival as a company is now a risk for you. It doesn’t matter how good the reliability you have contracted with them - if they go under whatever penalities in the contract for failing to deliver said reliability will never be paid.
You might even be at risk of them simply chosing to close that division - small company signing a service supply contract with a big company: good luck getting a contract where the parent company (rather than whatever paper company they spun up for that business area) actually has to pay you stiff penalties if they fuck you over.
As soon as mission critical anything is outside your company, a lot of otherwise irrelevant things become operational risks for your company.
This is why you don’t put your mission critical anything on an external Cloud supplier.
You know, stuff like the only copy of 70 years of TV history that’s actually just 50TB and would’ve fit a bunch of Hard Disks or Backup tapes.
This is something I kept pointing out to management at my last company, but they were always so hellbent on putting everything in the cloud. Then construction across the street cut some fiber or something going to our building. When I told management that we had no Internet and I was sending everyone home, they lost their shit. I mollified them a bit by pointing out that at least some people would be able to work from home. I then waited until the meeting the next morning to point out that only 1 QA/support person and 1 dev had laptops (because of course management didn’t see any reason to spend the extra money for laptops over desktops). It was also nice to be able to make the CEO and VP to drive all the way home and back to get their wireless data pucks they used as their personal Internet connections.
My overwhelming joy at all the petty little ways I was able to rub their bad decisions in their faces was a big part of what made me actually start hunting for a new job rather than just thinking about it.
Data you only have one copy of is data you don’t mind losing.
Or can’t afford yo duplicate in this economy
it sucks but they didn’t follow the basic 3-2-1 rule of back-ups (3 copies, 2 types of media, 1 off-site)
Well, they got the 1 off-site bit…
Aw, that’s sad. I loved Mr. Rogers and Dragon Tales.
Fuck cloud storage.
They are still around. This specific incident happened to a local PBS broadcaster, and it is only the local programming that was lost. Still sad, though
Yeah, but relying on a shady outsourced cloud storage middleman provider was kind of a terrible decision
100% agree. I keep all my media in 3¼ disks.
I actually have a marble track that automatically syncs with my hard drive to back up all my data in a series of binary pits that either do or don’t contain a marble