“Freelance videographer Dave Cooper has launched a class action lawsuit against Adobe — the company behind Photoshop and Premiere Pro. According to Cooper, a bug Adobe’s video editing software Premiere Pro CC 2017 version 11.1.0 deleted videos and photos that Premiere Pro should never have had access to in the first place,” Matthew Gault reports for Motherboard.
“At issue is a feature in Premiere Pro called clean cache. Editing video takes up a lot of hard drive space as video editing software creates various redundancies and backups during the editing process. Programs such as Premiere Pro store those redundancies in a cache and, once a project is finished, users can clear that cache to free up disk space,” Gault reports. “According to the lawsuit, Cooper cleared his cache and lost much more than just the redundancies. ‘The ‘Clean Cache’ command permanently deleted substantial and numerous Files and Data that were not within the ‘Media Cache’ folder or any of its subdirectories, including but not limited to Files and Data that had never been associated with [Premiere Pro,]’ the lawsuit said.”
“‘The files that were deleted were both his original video clips as well as files that were a result of his editing,’ David Deal, one of the attorneys representing Cooper, told me over the phone. ‘As a freelance visual artist, all you are and all you have is your work. If you don’t have your work then you might as well not be a visual artist,'” Gault reports. “Cooper estimated that he lost around 100,000 digital video clips that cost him around $250,000 to capture and create. Since the incident, he’s lost opportunities to license clips and videos to new clients because he says Premiere Pro deleted the content.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Cooper’s might be a lonely class action of one, since everyone else with videos and photos they value had backed them up regularly, on- and off-site and simply restored them when they encountered this bug.
What’s the point of storing 100,000 digital video clips and photos worth around $250,000 in a crappy Windows PC*, with no backup? To see how quickly they can be lost forever?
Backup or shaddup.
*If he had a Mac, not only would he likely be using a real NLE like Final Cut Pro X instead of Adobe’s buggy toy, he’d also very likely have had Time Machine enabled and his data would be safe.
SEE ALSO:
Stop cloning your hard drive as a backup – August 15, 2018
How to verify your backups are working properly – August 13, 2018
How to back up your Mac, and why you should do it now – July 23, 2018
How to set up your own Time Machine server – February 2, 2018
This new Mac utility app lets users wirelessly backup their iOS devices to their Mac – July 19, 2017
Yes, surely he has a backup was my first thought while reading this.
Man sues Adobe for having no backup… FOR YEARS.
I was always surprised that nobody ever sued Microsoft in the days of Windows crashes, bugs, and security breaches.
What kind of professional computer user doesn’t have backups?
However, I hope he wins, there are so many bugs in Adobe’s software, they deserve to be punished.
“Yer Honor, I swear that in all my many years of high-level perfeshinal work on computing machinices, I never, ever, ever saw anything advising the use of backups.”
“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.” — https://www.adobe.com/legal/terms.html
“La- OOO-Suh-ur”!
MDN: “*If he had a Mac, not only would he likely be using a real NLE like Final Cut Pro X instead of Adobe’s buggy toy, he’d also very likely have had Time Machine enabled and his data would be safe.”
Maybe the years worth of video clips were on processed with Final Cut 7 and he got burnt with Final Cut X for its first few years where it was not backwards compatible.
Time Machine – not really something that you should relay on for professional use. Drobo makes a good system, even Carbon Copy Cloner is worth looking at. CCC has saved me more than once!
Sounds like another money troll .. like those who sue apple for their kids getting sick from licking their mother’s germ ridden iphone.. what ma-roon… no backups, no brains.
That last sentence; salt and iodine on a raw open wound. Nonetheless, spot on.
While it’s fun to dump on the poor sod, we shouldn’t be quick to let Adobe off the hook. Deleting data that’s not even associated with the app is utterly unforgiveable.
Can I sue Apple? Photos lost a lot of our pictures and I can’t figure out when it happened. Going back month by month in time machine backups isn’t finding them.
“Time Machine enabled.”
Well, anybody who would assert that Time Machine is anything but worthless to a video producer doesn’t know the time of day.
Take a modern Mac video production environment, with a couple of 8-bay RAIDS full of 10TB drives and figure out how to make Time Machine back them up. It is a laughable proposition to figure out where to put over 100TB of data in a TM volume. Much less give it time to do any backups when you’re creating TB’s of new data in every work production cycle.
Time Machine for the startup volume, sure. But even video producers laugh at the little drive hanging off the USB port for that purpose. Any video producer worth his salt always has data redundancy, and off-site replicas. But Time Machine never figures into that equation. The poor sod who lost his data just learned the first lesson of video production — prepare for the worst.