When your cloud provider disappears, whose data is it?

A public TV station in St. Louis is currently in a Denver courtroom trying to retrieve 50 terabytes of its own video archive. Not because a drive failed. Not because anyone was hacked. Because the company it paid to hold that data simply stopped responding.

Nine PBS filed suit on 28 July after its cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage, went defunct. The data physically sits in an Iron Mountain data centre in Denver, but Iron Mountain's contract was with OSS, not with Nine PBS - and Iron Mountain says plainly that it does not have access to the data it is storing. Roughly 11,000 files spanning seventy years, including the station's coverage of the 1993 Great Flood and the history of East St. Louis. The station's filing describes most of it as unique and irreplaceable.

A judge has since blocked Iron Mountain from deleting or altering anything, and last week ordered it to hand over the physical devices. Nine PBS now has thirty days to find someone - most likely a former OSS employee - who actually understands how the storage was configured, and to extract its own material without corrupting anyone else's. Both sides report back on 14 September.

## The bit that matters if you run a small business

It is tempting to file this under "big organisation, big problem". It isn't. Strip away the scale and the shape of it is completely ordinary: a supplier held something essential, the supplier went away, and the customer discovered that "our data is in the cloud" and "we can get our data back" are two different statements.

Most trades and small businesses we work with have at least one of these dependencies without thinking of it as one. The booking system that holds every customer's history. The invoicing tool with seven years of records in it. The photo library of completed jobs that quietly doubles as your portfolio. The email account everything routes through. In each case the data exists, but your access to it depends on a company continuing to exist, continuing to be solvent, and continuing to answer support tickets.

Note also what did *not* save Nine PBS. It wasn't a backup problem in the usual sense - the data is intact. It was a *control* problem. Someone else held the keys, and when they went quiet there was no technical fix available, only a legal one.

## Three questions worth answering this week

**Where is it, physically, and who holds the contract?** Nine PBS's data was in a reputable data centre the whole time. That didn't help, because the contractual relationship ran through a company that no longer functions. If your supplier resells someone else's infrastructure, you may be two companies away from your own files.

**Can you get a full export today, without asking anyone?** Not "is there an export button somewhere" - actually do it, once, and see what comes out. A useful export is one you could hand to a different supplier tomorrow. If the only export is a PDF summary, you don't have your data, you have a report about it.

**If that supplier vanished on Monday, what would you have lost by Friday?** For most businesses the honest answer is a handful of things that matter enormously and a lot that doesn't matter at all. Knowing which is which is most of the work.

None of this requires distrusting your suppliers. It requires assuming that any one of them could go quiet, and making sure that would be an inconvenience rather than an extinction event. The cheapest version is a periodic export sitting somewhere you control. That's an afternoon, once, and it's the difference between a bad week and a court case in another state.