> This wouldn't have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and populated it with a few hard drives.

Okay hang on now.. that strategy comes with its own risks. Risks that I imagine PBS was trying to avoid by using a third party that specializes in archival data storage. This is a silly takeaway.

Edit: I was too quick to comment. I think they are suggesting that the NAS should have been used in addition to the third party storage, which is actually a great takeaway.

I read it as a statement of just how little data this is by modern standards more than anything else. This company is going out of business and PBS is losing this valuable data, and there's legal drama and multiple corporate entities involved, and if you read all that you might think this is some amazing amount of data that is actually difficult to deal with. Instead it's something I could stroll down to Best Buy right now, plonk down my personal credit card, and walk out with enough stuff to do a credible backup job myself, and we're not even challenging my credit limit or anything.

10 years ago, this was a lot of data. It isn't anymore and it makes it that much more bizarre that they're having that much trouble getting it back. It would be less to just give them access and let them download it themselves and perhaps stick it somewhere else temporarily than to pay lawyers to deal with legal filings.

To put it in vaguely physical terms, what once was a university library is now a good solid bookshelf full of stuff. Legally wrangling over a huge library is one thing, but if it's just a bookshelf, metaphorically, let them come in for an hour and clean it out themselves rather than bringing in the law. Obviously not a perfect metaphor on data size, this is more about how lawsuits are more of a hassle then just giving it to them.

Having that be there only backup solution would have been silly and dangerous. Having it be part of their overall backup solution including with something like the provider would have been smarter and better and prevented this entire problem

> It's not clear if the channel has backups of its data, but based on its determination, we suspect not. This is strange, though, especially for a major organization, as one can easily purchase a six-bay NAS on [Amazon] and populate it with [the best HDDs].

I think they just put that stuff in so they could shill their affiliate marketing articles rather than out of any actual concern.

3 copies, 2 different media, 1 offsite. One backup is none

The point still stands, but in what world can you build a 50TB NAS for $1,000 these days? I want to go there

Technically you're still correct even when you would advocate for both. Every additional copy increases the risk that the data is accessed by someone else.

A NAS is at risk from malware that can erase all of it. 100GB Bluray discs exist and work more easily for archival storage, as does multi-terabyte tape drive storage, both of which can stay disconnected At least two offline copies, combined with error correction codes, are advised. A cloud backup is also advised.