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

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."

Comments

Re:testdisk ftw

[rtb61]

One question though, if you actually do lose that data, actually really lost, how exactly do you prove in court it actually ever existed, the mind boggles, somehow because 'I say so', I am pretty sure will not cut it. It is kind of funny, it is creative content, how do you prove it's value without the work being available to demonstrate it's value, your time and effort, well, who gives a fuck it is worthless if the creative work is unappreciated by those who would pay for it, thus defining it's value. I would counter sue for legal costs, with the claim it is all a fraudulent lie and prove that by the other person not being able to prove the opposite. Somebody as a very, very, bad lawyer.

Sigh.

[AJWM]

Among other things, I'm a professional writer. My stuff might be worth 250k if you compared my royalties to what an annuity would get you. Or maybe I'm being optimistic; novels have something of a half-life.

Either way, when I'm done with a writing/editing session, a save script copies the files (as new files, it does not overwrite) to my other desktop computer, to an NFS server, and to a RAID'ed NAS. And to a USB flash drive which I keep on my person at (almost) all times. Occasionally I'll burn a disc to store off-site. Now, I realize a photographer's files are going to take up a hell of a lot more disk space than my mostly-text files, but drives (and optical discs) are cheap.

If your livelihood even partly depends on digital data, make more freakin' backups than you know what to do with. A writer friend of mine had a house fire (years ago) and lost all his manuscripts. He now keeps more backups than I do. (And no, the cloud is for convenience, not for real backups.)

(Of course, if worst came to worst, all my previously-published works are backed up on Amazon's servers and hard-copies all over the place. I'd only lose the as yet unpublished stuff.) ;)