alt.hn

8/24/2026 at 3:24:42 PM

PBS fears losing 50TB of data after being ghosted by cloud storage provider

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/08/pbs-station-fears-losing-50tb-of-data-after-being-ghosted-by-cloud-storage-provider/

by noashavit

8/24/2026 at 5:35:34 PM

What kills me about this is that 50 TB isn't actually that much data, and they could have pretty easily had a first-party, offline backup of this. You can buy a 16 TB hard disk for <$700 on Newegg (even with the storage price increases), and any halfway-decent IT person could have set up their own storage backup server with a ZFS pool on commodity hardware within a day or two. That's probably, all in, probably under <$3k in hardware and a bit of labor to have a local redundant backup (of cold, rarely accessed media) for everything before they uploaded it to the cloud that would have de-risked this whole situation enormously.

by qchris

8/24/2026 at 5:56:38 PM

HN title is inaccurate - article is about a single local PBS station, not PBS the national broadcast network. (Source title is unambiguous)

by t098i3

8/24/2026 at 4:26:16 PM

I know this has been posted a few times but execs need to learn “cloud” is just someone else’s storage they control. If the data is critical it can’t be in the cloud only.

by ramgine