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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."

8 of 275 comments (clear)

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

    if its valuable back it up?

    1. 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.
  2. testdisk ftw by ThePhish · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. 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.

  3. 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".

  4. 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.

  5. Re:250K and no backups ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  6. 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.