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Nasty Adobe Bug Deleted $250,000 Worth of Man's Files, Lawsuit Claims (gizmodo.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the always-make-a-backup dept.

Freelance videographer Dave Cooper has filed a class action lawsuit against Adobe, alleging that an update to Premiere Pro came with a flaw in the way it handles file management that resulted in the deletion of 500 hours of video clips that he claims were worth around $250,000. Adobe has since patched the bug. Gizmodo reports: Premiere creates redundant video files that are stored in a "Media Cache" folder while a user is working on a project. This takes up a lot of hard drive space, and Cooper instructed the video editing suite to place the folder inside a "Videos" directory on an external hard drive, according to court documents. The "Videos" folder contained footage that wasn't associated with a Premiere project, which should've been fine. When a user is done working on a project they typically clear the "Media Cache" and move on with their lives. Unfortunately, Cooper says that when he initiated the "Clean Cache" function it indiscriminately deleted the contents of his "Videos" folder forever.

Cooper claims that he lost around 100,000 individual clips and that it cost him close to $250,000 to capture that footage. After spending three days trying to recover the data, he admitted that all was lost, the lawsuit says. He also apparently lost work files for edits he was working on and says that he's missed out on subsequent licensing opportunities. On behalf of himself and other users who wish to join the suit, he's asking the court for a jury trial and is seeking "monetary damages, including but not limited to any compensatory, incidental, or consequential damages in an amount that the Court or jury will determine, in accordance with applicable law."

17 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. backups by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    if its valuable back it up?

    1. Re: backups by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Seriously how can you be so smart and so dumb ?

    2. Re:backups by dwywit · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's hard to feel sorry for the guy, even if he did lose a lot of money.

      Never, ever, ever put working video files - original footage or working copies, on an external drive. It's just too slow, especially in these days of 4K and upwards. The only things I use external drives for are backups, and transferring copies to clients.

      The bare minimum for using PP effectively is: 1 drive for OS+software, 1 drive for footage, 1 drive for MediaCache, and many external drives for backups. Never ever mix original footage and scratch copies - as this guy did. As an aside, I don't clear the MediaCache until after the project is completed, the product is delivered to the client, and all original footage is removed from the editing computer and stored elsewhere - external HDDs or whatever.

      When I use the term 'drive', it of course includes multi-disc volumes, RAID, etc. But OS+software, footage, and scratch/MediaCache should be on separate volumes.

      --
      They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
    3. Re:backups by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's hard to feel sorry for the guy, even if he did lose a lot of money.

      Never, ever, ever put working video files - original footage or working copies, on an external drive. It's just too slow, especially in these days of 4K and upwards. The only things I use external drives for are backups, and transferring copies to clients.

      The bare minimum for using PP effectively is: 1 drive for OS+software, 1 drive for footage, 1 drive for MediaCache, and many external drives for backups. Never ever mix original footage and scratch copies - as this guy did. As an aside, I don't clear the MediaCache until after the project is completed, the product is delivered to the client, and all original footage is removed from the editing computer and stored elsewhere - external HDDs or whatever.

      When I use the term 'drive', it of course includes multi-disc volumes, RAID, etc. But OS+software, footage, and scratch/MediaCache should be on separate volumes.

      General comment here, and not a criticism, because you are correct. While we can get into the concept of who has the biggest backup weenie, it always devolves into the same thing as the password conundrum, where someone eventually says they use doubly random 256 Characters changed every minute, otherwise they are dumb.

      When in fact, this reductio ad absurdum one upsmanship is contrasted against someone who had no backup at all.

      For all of the wonderfulness of the better backup methods, the man simply would have not lost his files if he had 1 simple backup. Didn't have to be redundant, stored offsite, or on several different volumes. It isn't that the good methods aren't good, it's just that having no backup period is just division by zero.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    4. Re:backups by dwywit · · Score: 2, Insightful

      1. He lost files worth a lot of money - I feel sorry for him.

      2. It's mostly his own fault - I don't feel sorry for him.

      #2 outweighs #1, so it's hard to feel sorry for him.

      --
      They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
  2. 250K and no backups ? by Crashmarik · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nothing on Blu Ray ? No other external drives ? nothing ?

    Spend that much on creating it, you need to budget back it up.

  3. Is it Adobe's fault that he didn't keep back ups? by mark-t · · Score: 4, Insightful

    [nt]

    --
    File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
  4. Re:testdisk ftw by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    as soon as you realize this happens, "testdisk" in a controlled environment is the ONLY solution i use.

    done boneheaded things several times, testdisk saved me each time... and i highly doubt adobe did zero overwrites or anything other than a simple delete.

    Exactly this. A thousand times. People don't realize how easy it can be to recover data.

    And even if you don't have experience, it ain't hard to justify professional recovery services if $250,000 is at stake. Common sense.

  5. Re:Backups? by youngone · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I saw a news item a couple of years ago about a bloke who had his car stolen, with his laptop bag in it.
    In the bag were 7 (seven!) USB drive copies of his Thesis. He thought he had backed them up, but he had only made copies.
    I have very little sympathy for these sorts of people though.

  6. Man fails to backup data worth $250,000 by Nkwe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Much better headline. Or to get with the times, "You will never guess how much this man lost by failing to backup his data".

  7. Read the license agreement... by azuroff · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Adobe's lawyers will point to the Terms of Use (https://www.adobe.com/legal/terms.html) that he agreed to before using the software, and that will be that.

    9.2 We specifically disclaim all liability for any actions resulting from your use of any Services or Software. You may use and access the Services or Software at your own discretion and risk, and you are solely responsible for any damage to your computer system or loss of data that results from the use of and access to any Service or Software.

    1. Re:Read the license agreement... by JoeyRox · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Except Adobe can't just waive away any liability with the stroke of a pen. There are existing laws and precedents which would supersede that clause, including implied warranties of fitness.

    2. Re:Read the license agreement... by Comrade+Ogilvy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Bingo. There is a reason why there is actually a thing taught in law school called Contract Law, and that one of the fundamental concepts of contract law is "the meeting of minds"*. Interpreting something in a contract or EULA in a manner that most people would find strange is always open to the challenge that it is not reasonable to believe that one party understood the agreement in that manner, so a judge might decide to void it.

      In this case, the idea that Adobe software might nuke files in within some directory under its "control" is something people might accept. But that it can nuke files somewhere else or "nearby" is not.

      * "The meeting of minds" is not some arbitrary concept. It is a logical necessity when using any human language that is not perfectly unambiguous under every scenario, i.e. every language. Because if the language of a contract can be interpreted in multiple ways, what do you do? Flip a coin? No, you try and understand what the parties involved were probably thinking.

    3. Re:Read the license agreement... by BoogieChile · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This wasn't somewhere else or "nearby" though. This was "In the directory that is used for storing temporary files".

      It's analogous to storing not-particularly-important email in the folder your email client calls "Junk" and then being surprised when they get irretrievably deleted.

  8. Re:Backups? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I suppose he actually did get an education that was valuable after all, just not in the field he was studying.

  9. Re:Is it Adobe's fault that he didn't keep back up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Is it the woman's fault she didn't carry pepper spray?

  10. Re:testdisk ftw by Zuriel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Absolutely not.

    As soon as you realise you've lost a quarter of a million dollars worth of data, you turn it off and hand it over to a data recovery professional.

    There are all sorts of ways to recover data which are appropriate for recovering your collection of downloaded movies or whatever. At $250k you're well into 'call an expert' territory. He could probably have had that data back for a few hundred dollars. The $250,000 in lost data was caused by him ineptly fumbling around trying to do it himself.