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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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08 2018, @05:09PM
A 4 TB drive costs about $100. It may also cost about $100 in computer and operator time to copy important files to that drive, and let's say it costs $100 to store that drive somewhere for its lifetime, and there will inevitably be some costs associated with accessing the backups whenever needed.
So let's make a very rough estimate that the cost of a simple backup solution like this "just copy everything to brand new 4TB disks and then store them somewhere" is about $100/TB, over the lifetime of the data.
Not having backups is like not having fire insurance on your house. It might not be your fault if your house burns down but not having insurance is your fault. We can use home insurance to get a feel for how much non-backed-up data could be worth to its owner: say the data has value for 10 years, insurance on a $250k house might be $1000/yr, so let's say $10000 is a fair value for insuring $250k of assets against total loss over 10 years, or put another way, we might estimate that backups on $250k of data are worth about $10000.
So with that estimate, we can determine that if one spend less than $10000 on the backup solution for that data, then it is money well spent, but if it costs more than that, the money would be better spent on something else. With our $100/TB cost in mind, this guy should definitely have backed it up his $250k stash if it was less than 100TB in size, which it almost certainly was.
The article doesn't say how much storage was needed, but it does say "500 hours" and it was all available to be deleted so it couldn't have been too huge. Let's (VERY conservatively) estimate 20GB/hr so that's about 10TB of data (which will fit on one big hard drive).
So since the guy doesn't have backups, we can use our estimates to put an upper bound on how much the data must have been valued (before he lost it, anyway, when he presumably quite suddenly realized its true value). 10TB * 25 * $100 / TB -- about $25k.