And that folks, is why you follow the 3 2 1 rule
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
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This is the 3–2–1 rule that PBS taught me as a kid:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s2-LEBc2sO8&t=3s&pp=2AEDkAIB&ra=m
Followed by Square One
3- THREE CDRWs should be used to record the daily backups
2- TWO of them should be kept at home. Drive the discs home nightly, preferably in a station wagon because they have higher bandwidth
1- ONE CDRW is burning data in real time. Make sure mirroring is set up so the CDRW is mirroring your live hard drive
What do I do if all I have are PS1 memory cards?
Make a PS1 Beowulf cluster and turn it into a NAS.
If you run out of PS1s, consider furbies.
Instructions unclear. Made self-aware furby army.
I for one welcome our new Furbie Overlords.
The Furbarmy Apocalypse is upon us :(
The data is all still there. They were using a subcontractor (who went under) that stored the data at Iron Mountain. Since the subcontractor was the customer and not PBS, PBS needs a judge to declare that they own the data so they can retrieve it from Iron Mountain.
Still, 3,2,1, folks.
if iron mountain does not get this data back to them its going to be a publicity nightmare for them.
50TB that they didn't have their own backup of? I could realistically get drives to store that if I really wanted to.
I administer a Plex server with more storage space than that. It’s totally doable.
Well, before 2026 it was. Now prices are bonkers and PBS is being defunded.
Even at current prices it's $3k tops.
I bought four 12TB drives in 2023 for about $150 each.
Now they're roughly $300-600. It's awful for consumers, but not for a company or nonprofit with decades of data.
Imagine paying a contractor instead of funding the Internet Archive!
This could have all been avoided with a single, well-publicized torrent.
Your friendly local data hoarder can easily fit that much data in a small server of theirs.
50 Tb is smaller than I expected
It's possible that 50 TB is just the portion that they could not recover from other backups. But even then, prior to the 80s and 90s, the archives would have been physical film, and any digitised versions of the footage could have possibly been just simple MP4 (or other format) video files, which at 1080p 24 FPS would be barely 1 MB/s.
I really like PBS and what they've done for the world throughout my life but whoever is in charge of their archives should be drawn, quartered, razed to ash and then asked politely to leave for having absolutely no in house storage.
I think PBS could probably handle the cost of one slightly above average old desktop PC (15 years old is FIINE) and 6 20TB hard drives FFS.
This only happened to Nine PBS in Missouri, and not the national org
Good to know. Missouri PBS admins, you know what to do next.
Archive-quality hard disk drives are like $50/TB