Confession time: I once lost three months of photos to a memory card that got corrupted. Obviously, I should have backed them up somewhere else, or at the very least printed them out. It was my fault, and I'm not in any way looking for sympathy. The reason I share this is a cautionary tale. Not only can this happen to you, it very likely will.
At the time, it felt like my whole world had collapsed. Could I ever trust tech again? I started to see everything from memory cards to hard drives in a new light. Not a guarantee, not even a promise to protect my data. More of a shrug and "Well, hopefully it won't go wrong...".
Twenty years later, my psychic wounds have healed, and I've almost forgotten the incident. But a news story this week has brought it all rushing back.
Nine PBS in St Louis, Missouri – part of the PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) network, which is roughly America's equivalent of the BBC – has spent months in a Denver courtroom trying to access 50TB of footage from its 70-year archive.
This includes historic material such as their coverage of the Great Flood of 1993 and the COVID-19 pandemic. Irreplaceable stuff, basically. And this data went missing not because a piece of technology failed, but because the company "looking after" it simply disappeared.
If a calamity like this can happen to a major national broadcaster with all their lawyers, contracts and institutional heft, how are the rest of us meant to cope in a similar situation? It's a scary thought. And the more you dig into the details of this case, the worse your nightmares will get.
Devil in the details
Nine PBS had used a storage provider called Open Source Storage for years without incident, and so it had continued renewing its contract every year. But at the start of 2026, the latter stopped responding to messages. When the contract lapsed in March, Nine PBS lost access to its data entirely. There was no warning, even though their contract stipulated that Open Source Storage needed to give the client 30 days to retrieve everything.
It later emerged that OSS had gone under as a company, and was listed as delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State. The good news was that footage was still intact, on physical servers inside a data centre owned by Iron Mountain.
The bad news? Iron Mountain had no direct relationship to Nine PBS at all, so it refused to hand over the data. Months of legal wrangling followed, including a default judgment, a lawsuit, and eventually a court-ordered process allowing Nine PBS to retrieve its stuff.
Urgent wake-up call
Incidents like this are a wake-up call to everyone, but especially independent freelancers, who'll typically rely on a single cloud service (hands up, guilty as charged) to look after our stuff. We all go around assuming that "in the cloud" = "totally safe", when really it just means "on somebody else's computer, essentially being held hostage and subject to the whims of business, the competence of stuff, and anyone who might have a grudge against us".
The point is simple: only having one method of storage, whether that's physical (a hard drive that can fail) or cloud-based (a company that can screw you over) is kind of insane. A proper backup strategy, spreading copies across at least two different types of storage, is clearly the way to go.
No, it's not fun. Yes, it's tedious. But would you get in a car – however much you trust the driver – without putting on a seatbelt? Exactly.
