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 …
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This should be interesting, particularly when you read the terms he agreed to upon installing the software:
9. Disclaimers of Warranties.
9.1 Unless stated in the Additional Terms, the Services and Software are provided “AS-IS.” To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including the implied warranties of non-infringement, merchantability, and fitness for a particular purpose. We make no commitments about the content within the Services. We further disclaim any warranty that (a) the Services or Software will meet your requirements or will be constantly available, uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free; (b) the results obtained from the use of the Services or Software will be effective, accurate, or reliable; (c) the quality of the Services or Software will meet your expectations; or (d) any errors or defects in the Services or Software will be corrected.
9.2 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.
9.3 If you post your Content on our servers to publicly Share through the Services, we are not responsible for: (a) any loss, corruption, or damage to your Content; (b) the deletion of Content by anyone other than Adobe; or (c) the inclusion of your Content by third parties on other websites or other media.
10. Limitation of Liability.
10.1 Unless stated in the Additional Terms, we are not liable to you or anyone else for any loss of use, data, goodwill, or profits, whatsoever, and any special, incidental, indirect, consequential, or punitive damages whatsoever, regardless of cause (even if we have been advised of the possibility of the loss or damages), including losses and damages (a) resulting from loss of use, data, or profits, whether or not foreseeable; (b) based on any theory of liability, including breach of contract or warranty, negligence or other tortious action; or (c) arising from any other claim arising out of or in connection with your use of or access to the Services or Software. Nothing in the Terms limits or excludes our liability for gross negligence, for our, or our employees’, intentional misconduct, or for death or personal injury.
10.2 Our total liability in any matter arising out of or related to the Terms is limited to US $100 or the aggregate amount that you paid for access to the Service and Software during the three-month period preceding the event giving rise to the liability, whichever is larger. This limitation will apply regardless of the form or source of claim or loss, whether the claim or loss was foreseeable, and whether a party has been advised of the possibility of the claim or loss.
10.3 The limitations and exclusions in this section 10 apply to the maximum extent permitted by law.
15. Dispute Resolution.
15.1 Process. If you have any concern or dispute, you agree to first try to resolve the dispute informally by contacting us. If a dispute is not resolved within 30 days of submission, any resulting legal actions must be resolved through final and binding arbitration, except that you may assert claims in small claims court if your claims qualify.
and yet millions do it online everyday. They say experience is the best teacher. I wonder if now, Mt Cooper, will seriously think about a proper backup solution to protect himself and his business.
Unfortunately, the sueball suggests that Mr Cooper believes Adobe is the only one that needs to learn a lesson here.
Yeah.. I do think it's a bad cock up on adobe's part, but using the line "my files are worth $250,000" and not having any backups makes you look stupid.
And also, he seems to have scrambled ineptly with a recovery tool rather than get in a professional.
And back to the legal issue. How can he prove what was deleted, or how much it was worth? And who made the evaluation? Legally, does he have to prove the files were there, or do adobe have to prove they weren't?
and yet millions do it online everyday
I have yet to meet an end user who bought an external USB drive to store their data to realise they need to back that up too.
While I'm at it, any case designer who came up with the idea of putting those external drives in a case on edge instead of flat, ought to be made to have that design inserted where the sun doesn't shine. When such a drive tips over in a powered state, a head crash + associated data loss is pretty much guaranteed. It can't fall when it's already lying down.
Well, I actually do back up all my photos and videos on an external back-up drive, and back that up on a different drive as well, and have them in lower resolution in the cloud as well, should all my drives fail. Having said that, I do feel I will add some more back-up storage, just to be safe.
You can't have too many back-ups, and Lu Tse would say (doffs hat to Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter)
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No. They can't. They're as fragile and as suseptable to head crash now as they were in the 80s.
Sources:
[1] Bitter experience
[2] The delicate tears of users after I break the news to them
Slightly more on topic though...
One drive? External? No backups? Data with the value actually quantified? No backups?? Yeah he learnt the lesson hard.
Where do you get your drives from, the 1980s?
No, fresh and new, I'm really done with MFM and having to look up cylinders and heads :).
What has changed is that the tolerance for drops when OFF is now very high due (several G) due to things like auto-parking of heads, but things haven't changed that much for drives that are live.
When the rust is spinning, most drives are still very sensitive - enough for your average end user to be in trouble when they (or their pets/kids, but I repeat myself) knock the thing over. Worst case you don't just end up with a data deleting scratch but also with roving debris. If that doesn't get quickly caught by the drive's filters you end up with rapidly expanding degradation.
For the average end user, that translates as total data loss, just from knocking over something that should not have been standing on edge to start with.
Ah, you've had Western Digital users too
It's a shame - the old design from 8 years ago was good hefty durable plastic horizontally oriented - I've a couple of 2TB drives from that era still going strong while comparable seagate drives came in cheap plastic tat with poor cable housing and drives that mostly died just at the edge of warranty.
I was reading about a film crew's work flow (sports videos) and it involved the raw footage going straight to two drives from the RED camera, and then being copied to more Thunderbolt drives on site. The team would always make sure that they took at least two hotel rooms, with at least one copy of the footage in each.
"While I'm at it, any case designer who came up with the idea of putting those external drives in a case on edge instead of flat, ought to be made to have that design inserted where the sun doesn't shine."
It is a ruse to sell more hard disks: when the user knocks a drive over and subsequently gets a bunch of errors from the head crash, they will ultimately buy a new hard disk.
Bruce Woolley And The Camera Club I think you should find... but now it's in my head!
Another Video Killed the Radio Star (all rights hereby assigned to Bruce Wolley. (ask Guy re Pixelation definition if you need anything))
I heard you on the internet back in ninety two
Lying awake intent downloading all of you
If I was young it didn't stop you installing Yahoo!
Oh a oh
They took the credit for your videography
SD written, when tape was the technology
pixelating black boxes were what clients got for skimping on your fee
And now I understand the problems that brought HDTV
you can see
Oh a oh
no more Max Headroom
Oh a oh
What did you sell them?
Poor I/O killed the radio star
Poor I/O killed the radio star
Picture cameras came and broke your heart
Oh, a, a, a, oh
And now we meet in an abandoned studio
We hear the playback and it seems so long ago
And you remember the dongles used to go
Oh-a oh
You were the first one
Oh-a oh
You lost the last one
Video killed the radio star
Video killed the radio star
In my mind and in my car, we still can't find
that last archive rar
Oh-a-aho oh
Oh-a-aho oh
Video…
Copyright hereby assigned to Bruce and Guy Woolley.
Backups.
I have a lot of video material and I have multi staged backups.
The originals on Beta, Mini DV, or HDV, and recently borrowed Video 8 and Hi8.*
Raw captures on an internal drive.
MPEG2 encoded on DVD.
Raw copies on BluRay (Mini DV is AFAIR 14GB).
Raw copies on another drive.
About 10 minutes on Amazon Prime.
* Got a Sony portable VCR on the computer desk and a couple of DV based cameras, just borrowed a Hi8 deck to sort some other tapes out.
Backups is one thing, but putting your cache on the same physical drive as working material or archives is just day zero stupid.
For the cache, I take the poor man approach and use mklink /d on a 32GB ram disk created with imdisk (I map %temp% and %tmp% to it also).
http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/
mklink /?
Backups is one thing, but putting your cache on the same physical drive as working material or archives is just day zero stupid.
No it isn't at all. Especially if you only have one disk, and even more especially if you're Jo(e) Public.
Even using the same directory isn't stupid - just because it is to us.
When Jo(e) is told that "cache is where the system creates temporary files which it needs to do when it's working - they get deleted automatically afterwards", there is nothing silly in then thinking "they may as well be put in with my other movie files.. keeps all the movie stuff away from my documents."
An external drive used in production for a start with the bottleneck that brings.
An external drive not backed up.
An external drive he couldn't recover the files from when they got wiped from the file allocation table (or similar, depending on the drives format). I mean, on the few occasions I've lost partition information or accidentally deleted a file I didn't want to, I've been able to recover, I've been able to recover co-workers files too, it's fairly trivial with the right tool.
All with such expensive work that he hadn't delivered, even though it hadn't been modified in 90 days..
I mean, bad form from Adobe as that's a stupid fuck up, but, he's also a stupid fuck up.
I generally agree with you, however on a technical point, if that external drive was an SSD of some sort, then deleting a file from it can be unrecoverable due to the way SSDs store data and possibly any TRIM functionality also.
But in that case, it is even more important to have a regular (not necessarily daily or even weekly depending on the frequency and amount of change, but certainly more than 'never') backup routine if you have valuable data.
Yo need two backups.
I have a daily one, onsite, and a continuous one, online.. and I lose nothing.
My wife only has the online one(she did not want the other one..) and she already had to use it once...
Just look at backblaze HDD stats.. about a 1% yearly chance of losing a drive.
My wife lost a drive in her array, and because she continued using it after I fixed the array and did not change all the drives (same model, bought at the same time, all obsolete) she ended up with data corruption the next time she lost a drive.. and she was very lucky that she had a watchdog for data corruption..
Absolutely. HE changed the cache folder to his bloody video folder, then turns around and blames Adobe for emptying the cache ?
Sorry bud, you put yourself in that position. And no backup after 90 days ? For a so-called "professional" ?
That should be an actionable crime in itself.
>Using Thunderbolt, eSATA or USB 3.x is not really a bottleneck - especially when you maybe work on a stylish PC which can't really be expanded despite its price...
Exactly, the entire rationale of the Trashcan Mac Pro was that it doesn't store much data internally but instead supplies a load of Thunderbolt 3 ports so that your work is accessed from external redundant storage. It's 1TB PCIe SSD is just for your current session. With an hourly Time Machine back up you will never lose more than an hour's work even if you were to accidently throw it out the window.
"and whats that? names please"
In a word, Photorec:
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
It's FOSS, works on (pretty much) all platforms, recovers (pretty much) all files from (pretty much) all loss scenarios.
No association, but it is my go-to recovery tool and has never let me down. Highly recommend it.
Insurance companies apply a "duty of care" rule to people who own insured items, for example if your new Mercedes is stolen they aren't likely to pay the full cost if it turns out you left it in a back street, unlocked with the keys in the ignition.
The same should apply here. His lack of a backup suggests that either the data wasn't valuable, or if it was he wasn't taking sufficient care of it. The judge should probably find in his favour, Adobe have admitted to the bug after all, but perhaps just award him a symbolic $5K or so in damages on the basis that he was 95+% responsible for the loss.
Insurance company tried that "duty of care" stuff on us after a theft.
Jokingly asked them if we should have the same level of security as the crown jewels - they replied that wasn't quite necessary, we then asked them how many times the crown jewels had been stolen (answer twice)
To be fair, I've known the likes of Adobe (Et.Al.) to Know Better Than The Host System and instead of just deleting a file's entry in the directory like a normal program, overwrite the file before doing so, presumably in order to erase any possible trace of previous authorisation keys when installing any Adobe product, which seems to be the default operation for any Adobe program that candelete stuff. Just because back then they were too lazy to improve their licesing authorisation system beyond a few hidden files, that could easily be located and copied thus copying the license authorisation. Which was great for pushing Quark out of the market (their dongle-based authorisation system was famously buggy), with world + dog running unlicensed copies of their software. Having no copies of your material is just unprofessional, but does not harm others directly; deleting files that are not "yours" is a capital offense for any programmer, so yeah, sue Adobe.
I'm sure the Reg will follow this with interest. Being the US' chaotic justice system, this could go either way. His exposure is normally limited to his own legal costs (unlike English civil law systems where the loser usually pays the winning sides legal costs). That makes it much easier for the small guy to sue the big corporations (can you imagine trying to sue Google in the UK courts?), but equally it combines viciously with no win, no fee arrangements to encourage vexatious and meritless cases, and that's further amplified by the US principle of punitive damages.
500 hours of professional HD is, let's say, 15-40 TB. You buy an 8-bay NAS for $1000 USD and $2400 to load it up with 10TB disks. That should give you multi-versioned backups for a total of $3400. My experience is that always-on NAS systems last for at least 6 years, so that's only $560 per year to insure $250,000 of work against accidents. That's 0.26% per year. Now when Adobe erases your files, you sue for a week of lost work while the backup restores. You have a good case that you did everything possible to protect yourself and the only error was Adobe.
Or save $560/year and hear the judge LOL that Adobe accidentally deleted your career.
My experience is that always-on NAS systems last for at least 6 years
I'd advise you to buy disks from different sources so you have them from different batches, otherwise all your disks may fail at once which sucks from a recovery perspective..
I haven't quite decided what to do yet myself. I don't need much storage and I have 3 separate backup processes running (one hourly with versioning which takes places automatically -MacOS time machine-, one rsync of data areas to online storage and one weekly to a separate boot disk), but I'm thinking about a NAS to offload photos, videos and other non-critical data as well as archive. The challenge is that NAS or no NAS, I need to ensure that has a separate backup too so I'll have to look for one that can automatically rsync critical content with online storage (in case you didn't guess, I work from home a lot, so there are work-critical files around).
Any pointers would be welcome, even if it means building my own box to do so (in which case I have to scout for good software for it, I'm rusty on Linux admin. I'm better at networking :) ).
NAS is primary storage and should be at least RAID 5, so unless your disks all fail truly at once, your primary storage should remain intact. In my experience, disk failures within warranty are handled pretty well by the vendors, so you should be able to restore your redundancy within a week. If you're truly paranoid, add a hot spare. Mixing disk types in a RAID array is something I've always been advised against, though never tried.
Then - on top of the NAS - you need a backup, preferably off-site in case your home or office catches fire or is burgled. In my case, the backup is the "old" NAS disks repurposed to back up ONLY the truly critical data via a USB/SATA adapter.
"NAS is primary storage and should be at least RAID 5, so unless your disks all fail truly at once, your primary storage should remain intact. "
Not true unfortunately (if talking about HDD not an all flash array) - having a hot spare wouldn't help either. It used to be okay with smaller disks however the issue with much bigger individual disks is that they can easily fail on the RAID5 rebuild. All disks will have their read/write limits and on average once one goes unless it was a dud then there is a higher risk that the others are in a time period where they will also start to fail. Now a RAID5 rebuild is a very very intensive processes that hammers the disk, making another failure quite likely (actually very probable). If another disk fails during rebuild then you have lost the lot.
A recovery of data from a failed Raid 5 array would need a very expensive process to do it and for most situations near impossible.
RAID 5 is insufficient for that quantity of data. The time a RAID array is under greatest risk (ok, apart from temperature extremes) is when stressed due to a rebuild, and the time to rebuild with a 10TB disk will be considerable.
So far I've only had RAID 5 die due to dual disk failure once (on small disks), but once was enough.
A SOHO device may be limited to two to three bays, so a single disk failure is all that can be managed, but for particularly valuable data something more enterprise is needed. Given the guy's work depends on his storage I'd be inclined to say he should be buying a managed service where they supply the hardware, monitor it, and automatically dispatch spare drives on drive failure.
A good NAS (not a Drobo) can rebuild at the write speed of the disk being replaced, so it's only a few hours. Losing all of your data would require THREE disk failures in less than a day - two in a RAID 5 plus one in your original. You can go with cloud solutions if that's not good enough, but TBs of data could be pricey and slow to recover.
I could be making a mistaking in assuming that this was actually professional video lost; something with a light degree of lossy compression.
"so unless your disks all fail truly at once"
Which can happen - can't remember if it was the Seagate SD1A firmware issue or another one, but someone managed to release a drive firmware that would brick the drive once it reached a certain number of power cycles, which is exactly the sort of fault you really don't want to have in a collection of drives being used in a RAID array given the very very high likelihood that all of their power-on counters will be incrementing in perfect synchronisation...
In industries where fault-tolerance is paramount (aerospace etc.), having multiple redundant components isn't sufficient, you also need to have multiple suppliers of said components, to avoid problems like the one described above from taking out your entire redundant system in one swell foop.
So you use RAID5 and identical drives.
Then one dies, so you replace it
Now the remaining drives spend X hours (depending on size) reading every single sector to recreate either the stripe or the CRC. Remaining drives from the same batch with possibly the same defect as killed your first one.
Your first reaction to a failed component really want to be to stress test their compatriots while in production and minus redundancy?
Yes, to everyone who said that the RAID rebuild stresses the components yada yada. We're talking about a one-man shop here who didn't have the sense to back up his data. He doesn't need enterprise grade data protection.
The question, ultimately, is "what is good enough"? In my case, wat I have is 'good enough' and it's a damn sight better than what most people have :(
AC - My set up is almost same as yours - Time Machine/AR Sync to multiple USB drives/ NAS for DVDs and duplication (not backup) of some important stuff. My lessons learned...
Not all NAS play nicely with Mac OS - I've got an old Buffalo which is a pain. They blame Apple, Apple don't care (Apple changed secure file access protocols in a rev. of MacOS). Net result is that Finder doesn't play nicely with my Buffalo NAS; e.g. it won't connect to password protected shares. There are ways round it - but it's a pain. I think Buffalo might have fixed this in their newer products, but their attitude when this became a problem for the model I had was that they were not going to fix it because it was not their problem - I'd only had the NAS a month and I was pissed off. I don't care who was right - QNAP pushed a FW fix almost immediately and Buffalo have been on my Do-Not-Buy list since then.
My other NAS (QNAP - old 4 bay) was initially set up as a time machine and worked fine. But all too frequently I got the "Your backup is corrupt and needs to start again". I don't know whose fault this is but I gave up using the NAS as a time machine and bought an Apple one because running a full backup every few weeks was not practical.
Obvious, but buy the fastest NAS you can afford in terms of read/write performance. Even then you'll get fed up of waiting for stuff to copy.
If you want to run your own server online then check what the software and support for dynamic DNS is like. I've never done it and have no desire to do it, mainly because I'm scared of opening my network to the world and don't understand enough about it to be sure I'm secure.
I don't use it for media streaming, surveillance, familiy sharing stuff. It's really just a big drive in the spare bedroom where I keep DVDs.
QNAP? I'm not affiliated. They're OK. Lot's of configuration/set up options. Help is mostly via forum, although there is some limited direct tech support I think (never used it). I've had mine about ten years. PSU died a couple of years ago but I bought one online easily enough. It's not noisy. It is bloody slow - but I didn't spec speed when I bought it. QNAP are still pushing firmware updates even though it's on their not-supported list. If you want to use it for surveillance then check camera licences - mine only comes with two free and then I have to pay for additional camera feeds (!). I'd probably buy another.
QNAP are a good choice in my experience for Home Office stuff.
Can RSYNC to other NAS (e.g. other QNAP), has backup to cloud (AWS/Azure/many others), and has storage snapshots (that can also be synced to another QNAP NAS). Can do iSCSI too.
From 1-bay to 16-bay+ and with SSD optons too (but sounds overboard for your outlined requirement).
I'd suggest looking at the HS251+ first (2-bay) and if that is too small/slow (SATA2) then look at a 4-bay model next.
If you are going to go RAID5/6 then that won't be enough, but as you have >1 backup in place then RAID1 may be enough for you anyway.
Steve
"Any pointers would be welcome, even if it means building my own box to do so (in which case I have to scout for good software for it, I'm rusty on Linux admin. I'm better at networking :) )."
I'm guessing the answer involves a Fractal Design Node 304, a bunch of disks and ECC RAM and FreeNAS (ZFS support) ...
But if all that's on premises, you can still lose it all to theft or fire. At the very least you want it in a good fire safe. But then you're taking it out, doing your backups, putting it back in every day. And you know you're going to stick to that.
I would consider backing up to the cloud. And perhaps using something like <a href="https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/>Boxcryptor</a> for confidentiality if you choose.
He's setting a price for those others, so they can also claim $250k for un-backed up data.
While Adobe should pay, to me it doesn't sound like the data should be worth that much as if it was, it'd be backed up onsite and offsite.
However, his time to restore the backup and the lost time in the active projects, that could easily be worth a quarter million.
While Adobe should pay,
I think that the difficulty will be in proving that Adobe deleted any of his files here (e.g. as opposed to him deleting that important shoot's archive accidentally or because he was sure he didn't need it /definitely had it backed up).
A journalling filesystem or a log from Premiere Pro (unlikely as its only cleaning cache here anyway) might help but the Adobe T&Cs probably limit any damages to the software/subscription price also if you read far enough.
He wouldn't have gone to court if his lawyer wasn't reasonably sure of being able to convince a judge that the Adobe software deleted the footage.
Also, Adobe have admitted that their software used to behave in this way.
The value of those bits is another question, but to be fair the damages really should be much higher than the cost of hiring a pair of testers to actually test Adobe software in the future.
Plus it'd serve as precedent for getting Microsoft to pay for their similar mistakes.
In the EU, EULAs aren't worth the paper they (aren't) written on. Maybe it's time for some precedent of that nature over there too.
Did MS not have one of these "let's just delete user files" bugs recently? If this has any measure of success (read: if the CAPITAL LETTERS DISCLAIMER software companies use is suddenly deemed invalid), I can see people thinking about doing the same to Microsoft.
Maybe I ought to stock up on popcorn, just in case.
:)
It's really Adobe error - users don't understand what programmers means by cache and the unstated implications of moving the data to a different location. And Adobe works in the cloud these days - they don't care at all and have no interest in explaining their products to their users.
I hope he wins big - if he does them maybe Adobe and other companies will start employing software QA people and will go back to writing and supporting user friendly software that protects users data.
But it's a good example of my "Users" law - There are only two types of user out there, those who have lost their data ... and those who are going to lose their data.
I think you're ignoring that both Adobe and Apple aim their products at those who tend not to have any in depth understanding of how computers work. Their software/hardware is more akin to an appliance, a black box which you're not intended to mess around under the covers of.
My video cache is on a pair of old laptop drives in a RAID 0 array. They could give out at any moment, but all that I will lose is my current cache. Raw footage and rendered is on my storage drive and external. If I made a living at it, I would spring for off-site storage as well.
It's said that the cache was located inside, but not in the same directory, as other videos. For example, the cache at /*/videos/cache, but the video projects themselves at /*/videos. If that's true, this would be entirely adobe's fault. However, if this is not the case, I would expect a product made for people who aren't necessarily technical to look in that folder and say "Hey, this cache folder isn't empty. This is where we put temporary work files; think of it as our scratchpad. Files in here are ones you don't deal directly with, but we might change or delete them. Are you really, absolutely, 100% sure that this is where cache files should go?". Plenty of terminal tools written for people who are supposed to know not only how they work but also how to rewrite them in some cases still have a "replace files?" prompt. That said, if this event actually involved the cache directory being set to the videos directory and not a subdirectory of it, I have less sympathy for the user.
.....it's NOT ENOUGH just to have a cycle of backups. You also need:
1 backups kept off site (so protecting against burglary, fire, fat fingering, etc etc)
2 a regular TEST to see that your backups will RESTORE correctly
Once upon a time, in a land far away, I was doing an AS/400 upgrade for a client. We needed stuff off the latest backup....and it turned out that the backup tape (and all the other tapes) were UNREADABLE. Yup....backups were taken every day, but no one had ever tested a restore!!!
So this guy seems to be a idiot twice over: no backups, no tests of the restore process. On Adobe's side of things: Is it a defence that the complaint is being made by an idiot twice over?
This was nasty.
I had a client who lost a few TB and he actually saw the files vanish of his $40k video server in front of his eyes.
The issue wasn't just the new cache clean mechanism erased stuff it shouldn't have, but more the fact it was set automatically to delete old cache files triggering the bug after the upgrade without ANY user intervention.
Seriously, it was a case of upgrade Adobe CC, launch then quit Premier and TBs of data vanish!
We of course had snapshots and backups, but it took a day to work out what had actually happened, then we had to change the cache policies on all machines and inform all my other clients.
There were alot of small time video producers bitten by this. Whilst it's easy to blame the end users, Adobe also share responsibly for producing such a show stopper of a bug.
I'm actually surprised it took so long for a course case - especially in the good ol' U S of A.
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.
I would have videos and cache two separate directories.
Over the next three days he would try in vain to get the wiped documents back with a recovery tool.
A standard delete should have been easy to recover from with basic tools unless overwritten of course.
Adobe would later acknowledge the bug in the release notes for a Premiere Pro 2017 11.1.1 update, saying the patch
Come on Adobe, how did this get past beta testing?
OK, this could be how it went down. I am just guessing. If he was backing up by taking a complete copy of his Videos directory, then this is what could happen:
Install new software hit "Clear Cache"
Backup then takes an image of his Videos directory.
Next day, he finds that the "new feature" has deleted files that hadn't been used for 90 days. And what's more they aren't on the backup either.
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It does not matter that he did not have OTHER backups... they owe him. I am sure that he considered that the cloud had his data, and the drive was his backup. That is a legitimate view to take for a non-technical person. And let me say this: running a video program does not make him a technical person. It makes him a person capable of running a video editing application.
Ultimately, though, Adobe deleted files that it was not authorized to delete. They owe him $$$$.
Courts can and do apportion blame. Proving the value of the files will be a tricky problem unless he had logs of what was shot (he should at least have logs for anything he billed to a client) but both Adobe's bug and his lack of sensible backups contributed to the loss. It is up to the court to set the percentage for each party.
It reminds me of when a friend asked me to look at his Windows PC to find out why is was dog slow plus other oddities.
As I would normally do, run antimalware, run chkdsk, run Disk Cleanup.
Oops. he kept his important files in the Recycle Bin on the basis that nobody would look for them there.
We managed to recover some files using undelete tools.
I got blamed, of course.
...usually have a "get out of jail free" card, exactly for these kind of things:
"this software may not perform its intended function in any way shape or form" etc etc...
Here, from a Samsung EULA on-line site ( https://www.samsung.com/us/common/software_eula.html ):
"THE SOFTWARE PRODUCT IS PROVIDED TO YOU “AS IS“. SAMSUNG DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE SOFTWARE PRODUCT IS ERROR OR BUG FREE, OR PERFORM OR FUNCTION AS INTENDED"
but this part is the best, and most EULAs have them:
"9. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY
You are solely and entirely liable for the performance or results you may obtain by using the SOFTWARE PRODUCT and SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS shall not be liable for losses arising from your use of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT and for any losses arising from your inability to use the SOFTWARE PRODUCT."
So, this guy is basically HOSED if he had to click through any of these EULAs we all love to ignore.
I highly doubt he can successfully sue Adobe if they have one of THESE in effect.
I back up 8 different ways - even a copy on a disk stored in my safe deposit box after a neighbor's house burned down and I thought that was a nudge for off-site storage. I may not have a business running on my computer, but I have a spouse who would be pissed if I lost the 200 gigs of pics and videos of family and activities/vacations, as well as a lot of documents. I work in the computer business and the relative overkill of my backups is in direct relationship to the number of horror stories that come into my workplace every month.
Everybody that works as a creative has had some sort of "crash" whether it's coffee that been spilled on a big presentation with no time to redo it or finding they've been working on original files in Photoshop and have really made a mess of some images.
This person does not have a case. It's standard practice for professionals to make backups (multiple) of original footage/images and work on copies. Even old school graphic artists that work with paper, pens, pencil and paints will make copies of their work. Many have even learned that drinks are never placed on the work surface but put to the side on another surface. Roadies will scream at guitarists that put drinks on top of tube amps. High voltage circuits are temperamental about having liquid poured over them. If you are lucky, your cock up isn't going to cost thousands but only some long hours to recreate it again but there will be some......
A good education starts with a good mentor that has been around long enough to have made or seen loads of mistakes. Formal education only teaches the few ways that something works, but not all of the ways people have really screwed something up. I've work/ed in film, tv and photo, made lots of mistakes and avoided lots more by listening to stories that happened to somebody's second cousin's wife's friend. All that might be needed to be successful is to not make those same mistakes.
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