Did you remember to backup?

[Brett Sherman]

Corrupt project or media files? Absolutely. Deleting original files not associated with the project? Nope. This is a particularly egregious oversight by Adobe. I’ve never had this happen in the decades I’ve been editing on computers.

Yes backups are critical. And often it’s user error that you need to recover from. Maintaining two copies of files is critical to avoid drive failure losses. So after you delete you project files off of your working drive array, that single backup is probably not enough.

[Andrew Kimery]

Also, it should be noted that this is an old, much talked about bug from the first release of CC 2017, it’s just back in the news cycle because of the lawsuit.

[Brett Sherman] “This is a particularly egregious oversight by Adobe”

A previous OS update by Apple bricked external hard drives so, yeah, debilitating software bugs can come from anywhere.

[Oliver Peters]

The Adobe bug was fixed quickly and quite a while ago. It could also be avoided depending on your cache settings. It was the “automatic” settings that had the bug.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Greg Janza]

A good backup strategy is essential to a happy post life. And in the case of the guy who’s suing Adobe because he lost hundreds of video files, he made two cardinal mistakes- not backing up his media and not creating a dedicated cache folder. I would venture to guess that he’ll lose the suite against Adobe.

Windows 10 Pro | i7-5820k CPU | 64 gigs RAM | NvidiaGeForceGTX970 | Blackmagic Decklink 4k Mini Monitor |
Adobe CC 2019 13.0 | Renders/cache: Samsung SSD 950 Pro x2 in Raid 0 | Media: Samsung SSD 960 PRO PCIe NVMe M.2 2280 x 2 | Media: OWC Thunderbay 4 x 2 Raid 0 mirrored with Resilio

[David Mathis]

I don’t see this person winning the lawsuit. Also, just saw this post in a user group in Facebook last night. I did not pay attention to the date but that was my error. My apologies in advance.

[Andrew Kimery]

I’m of mixed feeling about the lawsuit. On one hand, updates shouldn’t destroy/brick users’ data or hardware, but it happens enough that pretty much every update has a warning about the potential for data loss. And this guy had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of videos and no backups? Really? In 2017? At some point users have to be responsible for taking care of their digital property when it’s common knowledge than hardware and/or software failures could destroy data in an instant.

As I said, mixed feelings.

[Brett Sherman]

In this case, it’s not 100% clear a backup would have saved him. Since it deleted the files without warning, he had no indication that they were gone. The only thing that would have alerted him to the fact is if he had opened the project and discovered the missing media. There are times when I go for months without opening the project. With one of my drive synchronization procedures, it would delete the files on the backup too.

And given that he couldn’t recover files from the hard drive, I would suspect some time had passed between when it happened and when he discovered it. I could be wrong though.

I’d be covered because one of my backup drives archives deleted files. The other backup drive maintains an exact replica of the drive – files on that drive would be gone. But that one checks for corrupted files. It just goes to show that just having a backup procedure is not necessarily enough. It has to be well thought out to deal with any possibility.

And to be clear I don’t support this lawsuit. I file it under the s&*t happens category. Adobe has egg on their face, but financially responsible? I don’t think that’s fair.

[David Mathis]

What about backing up and taking the backup drive offline? I agree that this lawsuit is just plain ridiculous. Adobe screwed up big time but they really should not be sued. Bottom line is never trust a computer.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Brett Sherman] “In this case, it’s not 100% clear a backup would have saved him. Since it deleted the files without warning, he had no indication that they were gone.”

I think this is the part of the conversation where were we get into the difference between redundant storage and backup storage. ????

Keeping a mirrored copy of your active drives is redundant storage (which is good for recovering from a hardware failure) but the down side, as you note, is that any data corruption and/or deletion that happens on the active drives will find it’s way into the mirrored set of drives. Backup solutions must be quarantined from active storage for this very reason. Backups should also be kept off site incase of a fire, lightening strike, natural disaster, etc.,.

A small documentary company I sometimes work keeps one copy of their data on their shared storage (ProMAX Studio), one on external HDDs that are only connected when doing backups, and a third on LTO tape that’s kept in cold storage (the won’t even wipe cards from the field until the files have made it to LTO). They spend a lot of money on data security (relatively speaking), but they spend exponentially more in the field capturing things that can’t be recreated so to them it’s a no brainer.

[Brett Sherman]

[Andrew Kimery] “I think this is the part of the conversation where were we get into the difference between redundant storage and backup storage.”

And near-term and long-term archiving strategies! Almost everyone in this business only thinks about the former. Given my job I also have to think about the latter. Proprietary formats are death to long-term backups. I have years of Avid footage from the oughts that are for all practical purposes unaccessible. And I won’t get into why I think LTO storage is a really shortsighted, awful idea in most cases.