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.
The knee-jerk reaction here? Why didn’t you backup your work? Why depend on Adobe’s backup process?
And those are probably fair questions. But the complaint seems more nuanced than that:
“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]”
And:
The mass deletion isn’t a one off and Cooper likely isn’t the only user effected. Adobe itself acknowledged the bug. “With 11.1.1, only files that are within the Media Cache folder’s subdirectories will be deleted,” a blog post from Adobe said when they fixed the bug. “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.”
From Adobe post on unintended deletion:
Premiere Pro CC 2017 (11.1) introduced a new feature to manage and automatically remove aging and unnecessary media cache files. This feature was designed to assist users in managing existing project media cache files more easily. In the default location for media cache preferences, there is no issue. However, incorrect usage of this feature has the potential for unintentional file deletion.
Whose fault is this loss? Ultimately, I suspect a backup would have saved the day, and will be at the heart of Adobe’s response to this lawsuit.
Yea it sucks that a software bug caused unrelated data loss. But…its still the users responsibility to backup their important data. Years worth of work? Come on.
If its not some poorly written application messing with your disk, it could be a power surge frying the drive, or whatever.
If you CARE about your data, you’ll back it up.
Nuance, schmuance. If you don’t archive and back up your important work, I don’t believe you can call yourself a professional.
In a previous decade, it took multiple angry emails (which my supervisor did not completely tone down before forwarding) and several meetings to explain to my employer’s IT that our publishing group needed daily server backup for our large-files (book layouts, illustrations, photography, and site designs).
And that after having to repeatedly explain why their mail server’s storage limits (in the absence of any FTP support) were insufficient for the kinds of attachments we were in the habit of sending around.
No DAM, either. We might have talked about some sort of asset management amongst ourselves, but that would’ve required a whole new conversation with IT.
Our division’s collected work of seven or eight years was likely a fraction of your 18TB, but their VP’s training and philosophy couldn’t conceive of a workflow that required anything more complicated than Word or Excel documents. We had to point out the likely expense of having to re-create any one of the dozens of our textbooks that were being updated or reprinted at any time, should some designer’s single external hard drive have suddenly failed.
As much as I’d love to see Adobe get a smack-down here, I think they are correct in arguing a good backup would have prevented disaster. It’s not like Adobe’s software has in any way ever been bug free. Anyone who doesn’t back up is asking for trouble. Especially for a professional and their work files. It took me 10 years to get storage on it’s servers to mirror my local 18TB RAID with 20 years of images from around the world, work files, backups of curriculum files, etc. And I kept reminding them that I was not going to take the blame if my RAID died before they got me the space and time to do a good backup. It worked, eventually.
I’m not really arguing, but the other angle on this is that an app deleted files it wasn’t supposed to.
I’m a software developer myself, and I still think that really should have consequences for the vendor.
Agreed. The software was defective, and Adobe needs to be held responsible for that.
But this story should have begun, not with a lawsuit, but with Cooper saying something like “It’s a good thing I had a comprehensive archive and backup scheme in place, or Adobe’s bug might have deleted much, if not all, of my project files. This is an unacceptable flaw in an app I rely upon daily. Adobe owes me for my time spent reconstructing my active database.”