Nine PBS, a public television station in St Louis, is seeking court-ordered access to around 50TB of archived material after its cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage, apparently ceased operating and stopped responding. The case matters because much of the collection, spanning roughly 70 years, is said to be unique and irreplaceable, including local historical coverage and more than 11,000 files.

A Denver judge has barred Iron Mountain Data Centers, where the material is stored, from deleting or altering it and has ordered the company to hand over the physical devices containing it. Nine PBS has 30 days to find a qualified third party to retrieve its data without affecting other OSS customers’ information; the parties must update the court by 14 September. Iron Mountain says it has protected the data, lacks access to it, and has tried to help resolve the dispute, while Nine PBS says it lost access when its OSS contract expired on 6 March.