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

backups

[Anonymous Coward]

if its valuable back it up?

Re:backups

[Ol Olsoc]

if its valuable back it up?

The most amazing thing about the backup dillemma is that it is just so damn easy to keep yourself out of no backup hell. My backup system has local, hourly, daily and weekly backups. I don't even have to think about it, except when I make the archival remote location backup.

Whatever - the lawsuit should be against the stupid asshole who even after all of these years and all of the horror stories, kept exactly 1 set in exactly 1 place.

Suing Adobe? Well, what if his hard drive died? Sue the manufacturer of the drive? Computer glitch corrupts the files, Sue the electrical company? Sorry, It sucks, but you are the person in the wrong, it is tough titty cupcake.

Re:backups

[dwywit]

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.

Re:backups

[piojo]

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.

Does not compute. Why do you feel sorry for him due to him having an inefficient workflow? That makes me feel more sorry for him! (Clueless user's work was all deleted.) I feel like there's an additional subtext to your comment that I didn't pick up.

Re:backups

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

Re:backups

[dwywit]

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.

Re:backups

[SCVonSteroids]

putting *any* working files on an external drive is foolish

If you're not very tech oriented, there's no way you'll know that.
A normal person looks at an external drive and assumes it is the same as his own internal drive, minus being external. And there's nothing wrong with that assumption.

Re:backups

[Pascoea]

And there's nothing wrong with that assumption.

This made my brain hurt. There wouldn't be anything wrong with the assumption if it wasn't completely incorrect. I'm sorry, but ignorance of technology when your livelihood relies on technology isn't excusable. If those files were truly worth $250,000 that would seem to imply he could have/should have paid a computer nerd company a couple thousand dollars to make sure his rig and workflow are adequate for the task as hand.

When I showed up at my last job they were running on a shitty network. (5-ish clients running through a 10Mb hub) That's not the fault of the company that they bought the hub from. It's the fault of the business owner for not being willing to recognize that networking wasn't in their wheelhouse and paying someone who had a clue.

If this was a home user who lost grandma and grandpas 50th anniversary party video I would have a bit more sympathy. Granted, this is a shitty, nasty bug, but I'd be surprised if he gets Adobe to cough up the cash to compensate him for this files.

testdisk ftw

[ThePhish]

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.

Re:testdisk ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:testdisk ftw

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

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.

From a cursory read of the complaint I understand that he ran a program called Recovery 4, but that only gave him the folders and no files. I'm a bit curious how the court would look at this kind of "self diagnosing", should Adobe be liable (which seems rather unlikely in itself). I'm guessing the case would be dismissed without prejudice until he shows up with an expert witness who can testify that the files are not recoverable.

Re:testdisk ftw

[Zuriel]

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.

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.

Re: testdisk ftw

[greenfruitsalad]

> how exactly do you prove in court it actually ever existed

Easy. He'll show them the backups.

250K and no backups ?

[Crashmarik]

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

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

Re:250K and no backups ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually he did have backups. He kept a 2nd copy of each file in the same folder.

Is it Adobe's fault that he didn't keep back ups?

[mark-t]

[nt]

Re:Backups?

[youngone]

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.

Man fails to backup data worth $250,000

[Nkwe]

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

Read the license agreement...

[azuroff]

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.

Re:Read the license agreement...

[JoeyRox]

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.

Re:Read the license agreement...

[Comrade Ogilvy]

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.

Re:Read the license agreement...

[BoogieChile]

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.

Re:Read the license agreement...

[gnasher719]

The cache folder was not _inside_ his video folder. The video folder _was_ his cache folder.

Re: Orange Man Bad

[schure]

I wonder how this person will prove the previous existence of the files.

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.) ;)

Re:Sigh.

[AJWM]

The kind who edits the stuff he gets paid for, but doesn't worry too much about unpaid postings on Slashdot.

While it's true that anyone who has been paid even a penny for their writing could call themselves a professional writer, there are bodies who vet their memberships for a certain minimum income and quality of publication. Not that I care what you think, but for others who might, I'm an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, SFWA, (which has professional requirements for membership), and of the Colorado Authors' League (ditto).

Of course if you've been around the business long enough, (I doubt you have, with your high six-digit number), you might recall my name from the masthead of Byte Magazine, as Contributing Editor, Software.

Cheers.

Re: Sounds like the users fault

[Monster_user]

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,...

Re: Maybe there was a backup...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that is not a backup. It is an attached drive.

$250k?

[fred911]

Come on dude, we know its your porn collection.

Re: Backups?

[houghi]

I do have sympathy. Many people ate told that a copy is a backup and raid is backup. It is not the peoples fault they where sold the wrong solution.
I am sure there are things you or me believe that are true and are not.

Re:Backups?

[serviscope_minor]

I have very little sympathy for these sorts of people though.

Then you're a sociopath.

This is you just revelling in the fact that you know about tech stuff and other people don't. He even took a cood crack at it for a non expert: he had multiple backups. He just didn't have them in distinct locations.

Having a technical experitse in a particular area doesn't make you a superior person to someone whos expertise lies elsewhere. From your attitude you wouldn't feel sorry for anyone who wasn't a professional system administrator.

And even then if the stars aligned and he lost data you probably wouldn't feel sorry for him because you'd have done it better.

Re: Sounds like the users fault

[Monster_user]

Yes. That is what I read when I read the linked article.

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...