A PBS television station in St. Louis recently got quite the scare – and all because of who it chose to provide cloud storage.

The station known as Nine PBS was storing its archived programming with a Denver-based provider known as Open Source Storage (OSS).

OSS was using Denver-based Iron Mountain Data Centers to store the data.

This involved more than 11,000 files of data – much of it original programming produced by the station, some of it more than 30 years old. It included coverage of major local news events such as The Great Flood of 1993.

The data was understandably very important to Nine PBS. It was the entire history of the station’s work.

Which is why station executives became more than a little concerned when their February 2026 attempts to reach OSS about renewing its contract were met with no response. The more the station tried to reach out to OSS, the more apparent it became: OSS was ghosting Nine PBS.

But why?

As it turned out, OSS was in big trouble.

Station officials did a little digging and found that OSS had fallen into delinquency status with the Colorado Secretary of State. Nine PBS trying to reach someone at OSS before they realized the worst possible news: OSS had ceased operations.

There was some hope when the station identified a guy by the name of James Tramel as head of a group that had acquired OSS’s assets. But Tramel merely pushed Nine PBS off to Iron Mountain Data Center, which insisted it would not give up the data because its contract was with OSS, not the station.

What a nightmare.

To make a long story short, Nine PBS won a default judgment against Iron Mountain Data Center to make the data available, but the judge also made it the job of Nine PBS to find someone who actually knew how to do it.

The station managed to find a former OSS employee who was willing to help, and the court ordered Iron Mountain to work with him to get Nine PBS its data.

This is obviously a cautionary tale about being very careful who you work with.

Let us tell you why you will never have to worry about anything like this if UBX Cloud handles your cloud storage:

First, we’re not going anywhere. We’ve been operating since 2008 and we’re thriving and in good standing with everyone.

Second, while we do utilize external storage facilities, we have full access to the backups at all times. And so do you.

Third, you know us personally. If there is ever the slightest concern, you can get on the phone with us and we’ll solve the problem for you. (If you’re an MSP or a direct client who works with us and you don’t have the cell number of our CEO Steve Panovski – and you want it – email him at steven.panovski@ubxcloud.com and ask him for it. He’ll give it to you.)

Fourth, in the highly unlikely event a meteor wipes out the entire UBX Cloud team, our storage partners EverPure and Zadara are not under contractual obligations to refuse you access to your data.

What happened to Nine PBS is an outrage, but it goes to show how important it is to vet your cloud storage provider. If you want to know anything at all about UBX Cloud, call us at 586.322.5000 and ask. We’ll tell you.

We want you to be confident your data is safe and accessible. And the best way for you to ensure that is to trust us with it.