It's safe if you're following proper backup procedures.

3 backups in 2 different forms of media with 1 being off-site

A single point of failure is always a bad thing.

Wait, you mean the cloud is somebody else's computer!!?

Well, it is now.

3-2-1 data

I know a triplet who works in infrastructure. He would agree.

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

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

if iron mountain does not get this data back to them its going to be a publicity nightmare for them.

I administer a Plex server with more storage space than that. It’s totally doable.

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.

This only happened to Nine PBS in Missouri, and not the national org

Just because they are called "public" it doesn't mean they're owned by the public. It's a non profit created to produce media for public consumption, but they still have bills to pay, employees, etc.

If they have content for streaming or DVD sales or (probably more likely) licensing to other PBS stations, they need to get income from it to maximize their ability to continue to produce the free broadcasts they were created for.

None of it is solely funded by CPB. This is Nine PBS not PBS. 50TB is very low for broadcast footage so it’s likely a small handful of local shows, and a partial archive at that. For context, a 2000s consumer camcorder tape was 17GB per hour.

If their funding was 100% paid for by taxes, sure. But only a small fraction is actually paid for with public funds. They have to earn the rest to stay afloat.

Mr. Rogers would surely approve of sharing for the common good.

Correct :)

Well… if it’s in a cloud provider with 3 copies locally and 3 more geo-redundant why would we need that?

You’re right, but it is an easy fallacy to fall into.

I hope threesixtyp is livin their best life (IYKYK)

On prem is just a fire away from the same fate.

You can say it to the C-Suite all you'd like, but Goodluck getting them to budget for anything sometimes. Spinning rust, lto tapes, etc and the software to handle them is generally considered out of budget, at least at most orgs I've worked with (despite the recommendation to practice 3-2-1). Also, you may want to further detail your advice, most storage mediums (save lto tapes) require ongoing power to prevent things like bitrot. It's quite common for hard drives for example to develop bad sectors over time, but algos running on the drives embedded firmware clean this up by repositioning bad sectors to a reserve space. Nvme/flash is even more vulnerable to this and behaves similarly.

important enough to maintain a local copy backup. tis why I tagged #3-2-1%20ignore you only need the machine on when adding to the archive. Then just shit it back down and leave it alone. Nope.
Regular backup tests is part of backup hygiene.
Otherwise you have duds you need to replace.

Getting hard to find WORM drives & media at an affordable price nowadays. For larger orgs like PBS maybe it isn't such a problem, but for us everyday schmoes...

Afaik liquidation requires certain garantees of "highest price" like inventory auctions.

Regardless, a deal or notification could and should have been made.

Just goes to show the cloud is someone else's computer. A computer the someone else can do anything with, like declare bankrupcy and sell off.

In most cases customers are relying on their cloud vendor to do all of this and follow best practices.

Without PBS’s contract we don’t know what was promised or stipulated

Nine PBS found an extra $30 million to refurb their headquarters this year. They could have afforded a NAS.