My heart breaks for the folks at Nine PBS in St. Louis. There is a good chance it will all work out, but they are currently embroiled in a court case with a vendor who was in charge of storing all their archival footage. The vendor went out of business. Access to the footage has been cut off and right now Nine PBS doesn’t control what will happen to it. This is a cautionary tale about video storage with no great answer.
My love of great historical footage dates back to my days in TV news. The first station I worked for had a massive room with walls and shelves filled with old tapes. They were sort of organized, but it wasn’t great. Anything from back in the film days was pretty much gone. This was a shame in Baton Rouge, LA, where colorful political figures and historic storms were just some of the things where the coverage simply disappeared because no one spent the money to convert the old film to something longer lasting.
Louisville, KY brought a better system. Much of their film had been transferred to tape. (This was cutting edge at the time.) But finding the right canister in the massive film room was tough if you were looking for something specific. Also, there were certain things that had simply disappeared. The station’s coverage of the Kennedy assassination in 1963 had long since been lifted by a souvenir-hunting former employee.
Nine PBS had done what history buffs all over wish everyone could and would do: gather all the incredible, old, historic footage, archive it, and digitize it. This is more than just handy for a producer working on a project. It is good stewardship of irreplicable clips of our region’s story. There is museum-worthy stuff here!
But how do you store it? You need look no further than the videos stored on your phone to know these are big files. You don’t just throw them on your computer’s hard drive.
Here at Chemistry PR and Multimedia, we are lucky to have a 150+ terabyte server to store the video we shoot for our clients. We have protocols for storing and backing up this work. Nine also had the hardware, but when that filled up (as can happen when you’ve been on the air since 1954) they started using cloud-based services for additional space.
They did everything right up to the point that their vendor did everything wrong. I am no more privy to the details than anyone else who has read the article in the local paper, but the idea that a company could go out of business then refuse to turn over your work makes my stomach turn.
This issue goes well beyond video storage. Think of any data you have on the cloud. Who controls it? Can you get to it if there is ever a problem with that controlling entity? Do you have backups of your own? This applies to businesses and even personal items.
I would love to be getting to the bottom of this blog and preparing to unveil the perfect answer to the problem. Unfortunately, I don’t have it. This is not “one size fits all.” How much storage you need, what it is for, and how much you are able or willing to spend to protect it all come into play.
I write this only to say that I am thinking about it in every facet of my life right now, and you should be, too. Prioritize the things you simply cannot lose, either personally or for your business, then make sure they are stored, backed up, and safe. You don’t want to find out how honest (or dishonest) the leader of a faceless data company is the day they go out of business.
