Nine PBS, the public broadcaster serving St. Louis, is suing Iron Mountain Data Centers to recover a roughly 50-terabyte archive spanning more than 70 years of the station’s history, after the cloud storage vendor it had contracted with went defunct and left the data stranded in a Denver facility. The case, filed in Denver District Court on July 28, asks the court to force Iron Mountain to preserve and return the materials, which the station describes as unique and irreplaceable.
The trouble began in early March. Nine PBS had contracted since 2019 with a company described in the complaint as the predecessor of Open Source Storage (OSS), renewing annually for hardware, software, and cloud storage services. When the station tried to schedule a renewal meeting in February, OSS did not respond. On March 6, one day before the agreement expired, OSS cut off access without warning, ignoring a contractual provision that gave Nine PBS 30 days to retrieve its data after termination. When the station tried to reach OSS, it found the company’s website defunct and a delinquency status on file with the Colorado Secretary of State.
Investigating further, Nine PBS learned that OSS had its own arrangement with Iron Mountain and that the archive sat at Iron Mountain’s DEN-1 data center in north Denver. A demand letter on March 13 asked Iron Mountain to preserve and return the data, with an offer to pay reasonable costs. Iron Mountain, according to the complaint, neither confirmed nor denied holding the materials.
Nine PBS sued OSS and its purported president, Charles Wells, in St. Louis Circuit Court on April 16, then paused the case after James Tramel, described as a managing partner of the group that acquired OSS’s assets, confirmed the data was secure at Iron Mountain. Tramel stopped responding after about a month, an auto-reply said he was no longer affiliated with OSS, and he later told the station he had been defrauded into buying the company, which he said had serious problems with its business and the data it housed. Control of OSS reverted to its previous owners, including Wells, Ben Nicholson, and Justine Ririe. Nine PBS then returned to the St. Louis court and obtained a default judgment declaring that it owned the data, had an immediate right to possess it, and ordering OSS to return it or facilitate a transfer.
When Nine PBS’s attorney contacted Iron Mountain, the company admitted it possessed the data and initially indicated a willingness to cooperate, but later refused, citing the technicality that OSS owned the physical servers housing the archive. That refusal led to the Denver lawsuit. On July 29, Judge Eric Eliff granted a preservation order barring Iron Mountain from deleting, modifying, or destroying the archive while the case proceeds, and set a hearing for August 12.
Beyond routine programming, the archive includes Nine PBS’s coverage of the history of East St. Louis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Great Flood of 1993 that devastated the Mississippi and Missouri river valleys. The station’s vice president and chief content officer, Leah Freeman, said in a statement that the materials span more than 70 years of the organization’s history and hold significant historical importance for St. Louis. The Denver Post has reported the collection includes more than 11,000 files touching figures such as educator Susan Blow and jazz musician Willie Akins.
Nine PBS paid OSS for cloud storage, and OSS in turn contracted with Iron Mountain for the physical infrastructure. The preservation order protects the files for now but does not decide ownership. Iron Mountain has not commented publicly on the litigation.
Sources: PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct (Tom’s Hardware, Aug 13, 2026); Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data (Current, Aug 11, 2026); 70 years of St. Louis history is stuck in a Denver data center, PBS station claims (The Denver Post, Jul 29, 2026); Nine PBS sues cloud-storage vendor after losing access to 50 terabytes of archival footage (St. Louis Business Journal, May 9, 2026)