PBS fears losing 50TB of data after being ghosted by cloud storage provider

HN title is inaccurate - article is about a single local PBS station, not PBS the national broadcast network. (Source title is unambiguous)

What kills me about this is that 50 TB isn't actually that much data, and they could have pretty easily had a first-party, offline backup of this. You can buy a 16 TB hard disk for <$700 on Newegg (even with the storage price increases), and any halfway-decent IT person could have set up their own storage backup server with a ZFS pool on commodity hardware within a day or two. That's probably, all in, probably under <$3k in hardware and a bit of labor to have a local redundant backup (of cold, rarely accessed media) for everything before they uploaded it to the cloud that would have de-risked this whole situation enormously.

I know this has been posted a few times but execs need to learn “cloud” is just someone else’s storage they control. If the data is critical it can’t be in the cloud only.