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from the if-I-had-a-backup-I'd-still-sue dept.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Premiere Pro bug ate my videos! Bloke sues Adobe after greedy 'clean cache' wipes files
Adobe is being sued after Premiere Pro unexpectedly deleted a snapper's valuable media files.
David Keith Cooper on Wednesday sued Adobe in San Jose, USA, on behalf of himself and anyone who purchased Premiere Pro 11.1.0, and, as a result, had their personal media files nuked by the video-editing suite. The sueball claims a bug in the application caused it to judiciously erase expensive footage for his projects when he hit the "Clean Cache" function.
[...] At some point, he wanted to free up space on that drive, so told the app to instead use the "Videos" directory on an external storage device to store cached materials. That "Videos" directory also happened to contain footage Cooper, a professional photographer and videographer, had been using for his work. We think you know where this is going.
When he later hit a button to clean the suite's cache, rather than delete the "Media Cache" folder in his "Videos" directory, it instead wiped everything that hadn't been accessed for 90 or more days from the whole "Videos" directory, it is claimed.
[...] Adobe declined to comment on the case, citing a policy against discussing pending litigation.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Thursday November 08 2018, @03:50PM (1 child)
My wife used Scrivener. Of course, she started out by using the tutorial, editing changes into it as instructed. Then went on to write her own text -- many kilowords in multiple chapters.
Then came the day she got a Scrivener upgrade.
All her writing disappeared.
It turned out that Scrivener had upgraded the tutorial as well, replacing the old tutorial. And since she started by using the tutorial, she had unwittingly stored her own writing in the tutorial.
Oh yes, we had a backup. But backups are never up-to-date except immediately after you make them. And we were unwilling to merely restore from backup and go on using Scrivener without understanding what had happened. As far as we knew, Scrivener had randomly and arbitrarily destroyed her work and might do it again. We no longer trusted Scrivener.
I spent some time poring over the backed-up files using Linux and deciding that I probably could do enough reverse engineering to reconstruct her actual text, to be further edited with nonScrivener tools.
She contacted the company that produced Scrivener, and they were able to tell her how to rescue her text. Fortunately the old tutorial hadn't really been deleted; it had just been moved to trash and, again fortunately, she hadn't bothered cleaning out the trash. We managed to track down her writing in the trash.
After recovering her up-to-date work from the trash, she's happily using Scrivener again, and her text files are now not in the tutorial. I'll ask her when she last made a backup now that the Premier Pro problem has reminded me of this old story.
Scrivener now requires new users to make a copy of the tutorial, and to edit the copy when they are learning how to use it, specifically so that beginners are unlikely to suffer serious consequences from an upgrade.
I suspect that Premier Pro could be made to provide a warning if a cache directory is provided that already has contents.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday November 09 2018, @06:13AM
Considering how targeted an audience Scrivener appears to serve, I'm surprised they don't offer a turnkey backup solution as a feature or addon with the product. Even if it only backed up text, it seems like it would make sense to squirrel away drafts and/or copies of your writing in multiple locations to be safe.