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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."
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."
if its valuable back it up?
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.
Nothing on Blu Ray ? No other external drives ? nothing ?
Spend that much on creating it, you need to budget back it up.
Seriously,
You spend 250k capturing footage and don't have ANY backups?
46137
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Remember, software these days has "NO WARRANTY" nor "FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE" and knowns "KNOWN DEFECTS".
Just keep paying your money, and taking your chances.
Much better headline. Or to get with the times, "You will never guess how much this man lost by failing to backup his data".
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.
fucking moron
I wonder how this person will prove the previous existence of the files.
So super Dave Cooper is going to blame Adobe because HE failed. Good luck with that.
“Destiny doesn’t make appointments, nor does she waste her time with the naive and unready!”
- Farnam
Unless the space was overwitten, the data was recoverable. So he must have also been slow to notice.
If the "Big Desktop" corporations got sued everytime a bug in their apps deleted or mangled something, the corporations would be sued to oblivion. That's why they have "license agreements" whereby in order to use the app, you have to check a box that essentially says they are not responsible when your data goes kaflooey.
It's kind of like a North Korean election where your ballot presents two choices:
__ A) Kim
__ B) die
It's even worse with apps, since you may get both.
Therefore, do the Ballmer Dance to "Backups backups backups"...
Table-ized A.I.
what the fucking fuck are you whining about?
A better analogy would be if the woman didn't back up her files.
If so, It was the guys own fault for using his external video folder as his cache folder. Its not a bug when you clean up the temp folder. PEBKAC nothing more nothing less. If not, well It probably was the guys own fault anyway.
Thank you! Yes the only "bug" I see here is Adobe's software not prompting "this directory is not empty, you must provide an empty directory for your cache folder" when selecting a location. Which for all I know, it does, and he clicked some sort of "do it anyway" button.
How dumb can you be to specify an existing directory as a cache folder??
It would be "man sues external hard drive manufacture for losing $250k of videos when disk fails"
If there is nothing interesting about your storage, yes testdisk is great. It should be used on an image of the media, preferably a read-only image. Do NOT try to recover from the original media, if it's valuable to you. The only thing you should do with the original media is make an image of it, then unplug it and move it to a different room.
If you're using raid, volumes, or other more interesting storage recovery is still possible in most cases, but it gets more complicated. There are a lot of ways to go wrong.
If you've deleted data that is worth $250,000, it's foolish to touch it at all if you don't have both experience doing data recovery and knowledge of the on-disk format at each level - partitions, volume manager, raid, filesystem, etc. If it's worth $250,000, it's worth spending $1,000 to have it recovered by someone who knows what they are doing.
If you find yourself needing to recover data that's worth tens of thousands of dollars or more, you can contact me. When *I* want some help, I talk to Neil Brown and Ted T'so.
What do files have anything to do with her pepper spray? She's not running a nail salon!
If he really had $250k worth of files you'd think he'd have a backup.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
Everything they make is garbage, the world would be a better place without them.
Redundant Array of Inaccessible Data
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
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.) ;)
-- Alastair
I've found that Adobe Premier has some poor file management decisions built into it. Adobe has always done it's own thing irrespective of operating system conventions and procedures as far as temporary files and folders are concerned
Though, content creators need multiple backups at every step of the process. A video editing program like many content creation, engineering, and scientific programs are very demanding on computer systems. Anything can happen.
Unfortunately because of Internet patch-as-you-sell methods, we are all beta-testers, now
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Juts to give the poor bastard the benefit of the doubt, maybe he had one backup drive... that he kept synced to the state of the primary drive.
In that way you could have a backup and still delete all that stuff. :-(
However, as soon as he realized anything was gone he should have immediately gone to recover the items from the raw data still left on disc (just not known by the file system), unless Adobe is doing some kind of fancy write-over-data? Seems unlikely.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, because the "victim" was entirely unintended, and the consequence of deleted files would have been trivial to prevent.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I have mixed feelings here - what if an automaker said "is it our fault you don't have enough insurance" after their software mistake caused cars to crash?
Actually, the GP had it backwards. The lawsuit is that when the user cleared D:\Videos\Cache, it cleared D:\Videos as well. Adobe was directed to use "D:\Videos" as the location to create the cache folder "D:\Videos\Cache". Adobe was not directed to use or make changes to any other files or folders in D:\Videos.
Experienced users would probably have balked at this user's configuration due to the risk of this very thing happening. Programmers even more so, I would think. The value of the variable being passed around in the program is "D:\Videos". Something is bound to affect other folders in that directory,...
When someone claims person Y's life was worth $Z, I inquire as to if they had >=$Z life insurance on Y. If not, they are lying about the value of Y's life to them.
In this case, the question is "Were these files worth backing up in case a house fire destroyed them?". If the answer is "No", then I know how little they are worth (given the low cost of offsite backups either via sneakernet or via the internet or other communication medium). If the answer is "Yes", then the damages (if any) would just be the cost of retrieving the backup and restoring the files.
Why should a third party care more about your files than you do -- esp. when you explicitly decided NOT to back up your files and the third party's destruction of them was the result of an unintended bug?
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Come on dude, we know its your porn collection.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Yeah, that is not a backup. It is an attached drive.
Points to the AC that said that. And a pat on the back for me for thinking there was going to be a good comment lurking in that.
Still don't do backups.
Then again unlimited Backblaze is a full $99 per 2 years!
yes testdisk is great. It should be used on an image of the media, preferably a read-only image. Do NOT try to recover from the original media, if it's valuable to you
While in general this advice is good, it doesn't actually apply to testdisk. Testdisk does not restore in place (i.e. by "fixing" the filesystem's inodes and directory entries to point again to the files), but rather dumps the files it finds to another disk.
Actually, testdisk is filesystem agnostic, and recognizes the the data to be recovered by their signatures at beginning of file, and then works basically with the assumption (often true) that each file occupies a number of consecutive sectors. Assumption breaks down as soon as original filesystem was almost full, and files thus fragmented.
1. external drives have nearly 0 I/O. Just undelete the files. No other data was written to the drive so there's a 100% chance of getting 100% of the data back.
2. he signed a EULA releasing Adobe from any damage caused by the software
3. why didn't he back anything up? External drives fail all the time.
While I think humanity would be best served if we take the Adobe exec team, wrapped them into barbed wire and shot them into the sun and let the company itself and all its products and services die in a fire (Hint: I don't like Adobe too much and for good reasons) I'm not sure if they are entirely to blaim in this case.
In short: Anything could've taken out that drive / directory with the critical data.
If you've got critical data and you're not doing regular overturning backups, it's you who needs a solid kick in the balls (if it's not your data) or, in this case, have to go through the pain he's just suffering in order to learn.
Sorry dude. No backups? Your case won't hold water.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This doesn't make sense. So you are saying that if I put the cache folder into my home directory, it is going to delete the contents of the home directory? I suppose if that happened Adobe would be without customers by now.
Blame women for their own rape if they could have prevented it.
Well, yes. If she could have said "no" but instead said "of yeah, fuck me harder!", then the rape is entirely her fault. Just like if she could have said "no, don't delete my files" but instead said "put the media cache in the same folder as my files, and then delete the cache", it's her fault she got fucked.
They would have a fair point. If you're transporting a $20,000,000 painting in your car and don't have it insured, I wouldn't expect them to pay you for the painting after the car crashes. Cars crash all the time for all kinds of reasons; you should have taken proper precautions.
Depends on what kind of external drive though. If it's attached with SAS, Fibre Channel, iSCSI over 40GbE, or a number of other technologies, it will outperform most people's internal disks.
Read the ULA.
Running without backup is gross negligence by any sane standard. This person should get nothing.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
FOAD, please.
If the data is actually worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or tens of thousands, do you think having a backup might be a good idea? Or should you run recovery tools on your only copy, in a system that apparently has bugs software that randomly deletes stuff or a dodgy drive controller or whatever caused the problem, while you're under stress and the adrenaline and high heart rate has cut your cerebral cortex function by 40%?
You should have put another copy in the other room LAST MONTH. Do it now.
The update changes the behavior of the media cache deletion. With 11.1.1, only files that are within the Media Cache folder’s subdirectories will be deleted. Files that sit next to it will no longer be affected. However, we still strongly recommend keeping the Media Cache folder separate from your original media.
https://theblog.adobe.com/prem...
If the videos / video clips had a value of $250 000, then why didn't he have them safely backed? Maybe Adobe shouldn't of cleared the entire cache folder but who is honestly dumb enough to store files in a cache folder as means of protecting them? Using a cache folder to store your video files, is no different then using the recycle bin, on Windows, then blaming Microsoft for deleting all your files when you emptied the trash.
If I were the judge in the case, I would probably just throw the case out because:
1. He should have had data recovery run on it, Recuva is a free 2 minute download that takes just a couple clicks, anybody in IT can do it for you if you cant figure it out. If this is one of the odd cases that has to go to an expert(it probably still can), your looking at a couple hundred $$ at most. So failure of due care.
2. No backups, it cant of been that important.
3. Proof the videos existed.
4. How did he arrive at the $250,000 valuation? Did he have a buyer willing to pay that much for the video? Was there a $250k project he was working on that got erased? Is every single hour of video worth $500?
This REALLY sounds like a scam to me.
Yeah, that is not a backup. It is an attached drive.
You misunderstood.
I have an external back-up drive I sync to once a week or so.
If I didn't notice the data loss for a week, or I it happened the day before my sync, then I could easily sync my blackup out of existence without noticing.
The problem is you can't just have a policy of "never delete" without a lot of wasted space if you move things often or have projects with large temporary by-products you do not want to keep.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A more detailed reading shos that Adobe creates a cache folder within the path that you give it and places the cache files in the cache folder. It then deleted files OUTSIDE of the cache folder.
That's a pretty big bug.
Next time people criticise using cloud services as just putting data on "Someone Else's Computer" It's always worth while reflecting on the way many people out their would manage their own computer and their own data.
I think you'll find that this particular idiot is in company with a large portion of computer users out there.
So wait... if I'm reading this correctly, he configured his Videos directory to be his project cache directory?
So he had no backups, and made a very boneheaded misconfiguration of his settings. I'm honestly surprised he hadn't suffered a catastrophic issue before now.
TFA doesn't mention what platform he's running on, but if he was on a Mac, then that's an order of magnitude even more stupid, cause in order to back up you literally just have to buy a USB hard drive and plug it in. The first the OSX will do when it sees the drive is ask if you want to use it with Time Machine. Then you click "Yes". It's literally THAT easy.
If the data is worth that much, a tape drive is a good investment. Optical discs are too small to be practical for terabytes.
Yep, standard software EULA states in essence, use at your own risk. And you have to pay us for that agreement.
No, because what you have is not a backup system. At the very least it fails to qualify because you have no complete copy of the data during the weekly interval while the sync process is running
It is a complete copy, that I keep offsite. I bring it in once a week or so to refresh the copy.
Again, any decent backup system will provide a way to designate folders (or perhaps even individual files) to be excluded.
You are discounting the reality where you keep temporary working material in the same directory with other things and then remove it. Or maybe you move things around. Either way stuff could get moved out of the directory and then a COMPLETE copy would also remove it from that area when refreshed.
Time Machine handles this best where it keeps around deleted material for some length of time. But when you are backing up a nearly full 4TB drive to another 4TB backup you do not have that luxury.
Probably the solution in my case is backup to a larger drive than the original, and leave on some of Carbon Copy Cloner's options for keeping deleted items (though again, I don't want most items to appear in the original directory if I have chosen to remove them, I just want things recoverable in case of accidental deletion).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What if the insurance coverage isn't enough money for the rest of your life with a disability? Or if it kills you? See Jeep settling with Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin's family for killing him.
For what it's worth, my wife blames this particular "victim" as well...
But on the matter of "vicim" blaming... here's an analogy:
If I leave my office at the end of the day with some important papers in the recycle bin for whatever reason, I can't exactly go and blame the janitorial department the next morning when I come into work for throwing them out because I didn't have to put them there in the first place, and they had no way to know ahead of time that they were important. I'm the one who suffers, but it's my own fault for being lazy and not putting the papers in a more secure location.
Adobe didn't go and maliciously try and delete files that they had any reasonable way of knowing were important or valuable. It's unfortunate, of course, but it is entirely this person's fault alone for the data loss
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Jeep settled to avoid further PR problems. Nothing was really wrong with the vehicle, but enough people were careless with it that the smart move for Dodge/Jeep/Chrysler was to put out a recall for added safety and settle with his family. I wouldn't say they had any kind of obligation to do so, and I very much doubt that any court would have found them to be at fault.
In cases where a manufacturer may be at fault, some compensation may be appropriate, especially in cases of gross negligence. It is very much situation dependant.
Posting for the second time - my AC first post gets filtered and I wanted to vent again! ArcGIS' arcpy Python package deleted about 15 TB of my data (about 90% backed up, some hadn't been yet) and two commercial disk recovery programs, Recuva and Eraser, failed to recover ALL the files, got about 95% back, about six months ago. They created a bug when doing parallel processing where they wrote temp directories for this purpose to the root of the drive and when doing this it deleted data on the drive, I'm guessing when it ran out of temp space. I wiped out two hard drives before I figured out an error in their programming was wiping out my data. I have never gotten the full story on what was happening as they don't let users talk to the developers, just the support people. I had to spend three weeks of my time troubleshooting it for them because 'my script was too complex'. That's what it took to trigger this ridiculous mess, a fairly complex process to trigger the right functions in the right order. We shouldn't be liable when a program deletes something in an area other than what was commanded, whether it was backed up or not. As was noted above with contract law, their EULA isn't a complete get out of jail free card. https://my.esri.com/#/support/...
A single copy which you mutate in place is not a backup system.
I am done, since this is semantically absurd. If I can restore files from it - guess what, it is a backup.
By your definition there is "no true backup" because at any moment a drive could fail while in the middle of copying a single file, no mater how you arrange anything.
I'll let you have the last response because you are just playing word games, not taking backup seriously.
A second 4+TB backup drive would be one simple solution. Just cycle between them and you'll always have last week's backup to fall back on if something goes wrong.
You cannot know at any point in time if that second hard drive has been destroyed. You obviously need an infinite number of drives *rolls eyes*.
That sounds like a workflow issue.
One quick LifeHack here for everyone - It is stupid to adjust what you do to fit a backup system instead of finding a backup system that works for the way you work. Because you WILL fail to organize things according to whatever fancy scheme you have in place at some point and then things will go south. Find a way to maintain copies of files that gives you the best chance of recovery in case of fire, theft or driver failure. Anything that solves that problem to ANY degree is in fact a backup system.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley