Maryland man without backup sues Adobe over Premiere Pro file-eating bug

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Comments

  • Reply 41 of 61
    IMHO, a good percentage of ppl still don't back up. It was is so bad that Apple had to create a solution and not call it a backup so that ppl would actually use it...maybe. Production houses employee staff just to handle hardware, backups and asset protection. I think some of these comments are coming from the perspective from more technical ppl that were willing to dig into the weeds and support their own computing needs.
    I have had many personal interactions with creatives and sometimes that external drive is all they have and maybe a Drobbox account and this no way diminishes the quality of their work.  They just expect when it is time to crank out a product that everything just works.


  • Reply 42 of 61
    wigginwiggin Posts: 2,265member
    wiggin said:
    hexclock said:
    Keeping one copy of your stuff on a 7 year old drive that presumably gets fairly heavy use, as a Professionalis walking a tightrope. I am going to assume that drive failure was ruled out. 
    Moving the cache folder seems unnecessary; if your internal storage is too small, upgrade it or put your scratch files on another external. Generally speaking, dragging folders out of Apps is risky. Links get broken or moved and weird things can happen.
    The article doesn’t say what kind of Mac he had or what version of the OS was running, so who knows. Maybe he will win, but in the end, just back up your stuff...it’s so easy and cheap to do. 


    I don't think the article said the drive was 7 years old. Only that it was 7 years worth of data. Drive could have been brand-spanking-new for all we know.

    The attitude of the article is uncalled for..."Let's all pile on and make fun of the poor guy that lost his data. What an idiot." I know the article is marked as an "Editorial" but it doesn't even qualify as that. Is this Twitter or a site trying to be a legit source of new and information?
    This article is the definition of editorial. You are welcome to have different opinions. This one is William's. And, coincidentally, mine.

    This all said, I have better safeguards and workflows for articles I've written, and I don't need to keep those to make money. As I said in the first page of comments, keeping your own data safe is your own duty and always has been. You're asking for trouble, and will eventually get it, if you expect others to maintain it for you.
    I'm not saying the facts or even the opinions in the article are wrong. Yes, the guy should have had a backup. I'm saying the attitude/tone was unnecessary. But I guess there is a lot of that going around lately.
  • Reply 43 of 61
    "the terms of using the Adobe software are pretty clear about the company not being responsible for data loss for any reason" If that's what win the day, then you have crappy consumer protection laws. In Australia, what a company puts in any agreement does not trump Australian Consumer Law. The software is obviously no fit-for-purpose, so he would be entitled to a refund, and that would probably open the door for the legal action he has taken.
  • Reply 44 of 61
    dewmedewme Posts: 5,333member
    I think this guy has suffered damage but it will be very difficult for him to prove the value of what he lost. I totally disagree about this being a class action case, it's simply one stupid guy and some unintentional damage inflicted by Adobe.

    Consider this analogy: The guy in this case is someone who owns a supposedly priceless painting and proudly keeps it hanging on the wall of his home. Despite everyone including the paperboy telling him to get an appraisal and insurance coverage on the painting, the guy simply refuses. He believes he can personally safeguard his valuables, and insurance costs money. At some point the guy hires a carpet cleaning company, Adobe CC, to clean the carpet in the same room where the priceless painting is hanging. Again, the painting's owner takes no precautions to safeguard the painting ever, much less during the time the carpet cleaning service is in his home. The dimwitted carpet cleaner dude unintentionally puts kerosene into the reservoir of the carpet cleaning machine instead of the detergent+water mix. The carpet cleaning machine soon bursts into flames, incinerating the carpet and the priceless painting. Who is to blame?

    - The owner of the painting was negligent in not protecting his valuable personal property. However, his negligence did not cause the property in question to be destroyed, it merely made it more likely to occur. 
    - The carpet cleaning company was negligent in how it performed the service that resulted in the destruction of the guy's property. Their action directly caused the destruction of the guy's personal property. 

    Both parties are to blame to some extent. It's up to the two parties to reach a settlement. It's going to be very difficult for the damaged party to prove the value of the supposed priceless painting since no appraisal was performed for insurance purposes. But in no way should (imho) the carpet cleaning company that caused the actual damage in this specific case be expected to compensate other parties unless it can be shown that the carpet cleaning company inflicted the same damage on others through a common fault of their own, for example, supplying mislabeled (kerosene filled) cleaning fluid containers to all of its carper cleaners, i.e., exonerating the carper cleaner dude and opening this up to being a class action case.

    There's a big difference between putting oneself or others at risk and initiating an an action that actually causes damage. In the Adobe case the guy losing the files put himself and his livelihood at risk by not safeguarding his personal property. Adobe put its users at risk by inadequately testing its software. But it was still Adobe's software that (allegedly) caused the damage here. Some sort of compensation is justified, but it's going to be every hard to put a hard number on it without proof of the value of what was damaged. The recklessness with which both parties conducted themselves leading up to the damage should be considered. Maybe give the guy a free subscription to Adobe for one year, and maybe a sticker.
    muthuk_vanalingam
  • Reply 45 of 61
    Mike WuertheleMike Wuerthele Posts: 6,858administrator
    dewme said:
    I think this guy has suffered damage but it will be very difficult for him to prove the value of what he lost. I totally disagree about this being a class action case, it's simply one stupid guy and some unintentional damage inflicted by Adobe.

    Consider this analogy: The guy in this case is someone who owns a supposedly priceless painting and proudly keeps it hanging on the wall of his home. Despite everyone including the paperboy telling him to get an appraisal and insurance coverage on the painting, the guy simply refuses. He believes he can personally safeguard his valuables, and insurance costs money. At some point the guy hires a carpet cleaning company, Adobe CC, to clean the carpet in the same room where the priceless painting is hanging. Again, the painting's owner takes no precautions to safeguard the painting ever, much less during the time the carpet cleaning service is in his home. The dimwitted carpet cleaner dude unintentionally puts kerosene into the reservoir of the carpet cleaning machine instead of the detergent+water mix. The carpet cleaning machine soon bursts into flames, incinerating the carpet and the priceless painting. Who is to blame?

    - The owner of the painting was negligent in not protecting his valuable personal property. However, his negligence did not cause the property in question to be destroyed, it merely made it more likely to occur. 
    - The carpet cleaning company was negligent in how it performed the service that resulted in the destruction of the guy's property. Their action directly caused the destruction of the guy's personal property. 

    Both parties are to blame to some extent. It's up to the two parties to reach a settlement. It's going to be very difficult for the damaged party to prove the value of the supposed priceless painting since no appraisal was performed for insurance purposes. But in no way should (imho) the carpet cleaning company that caused the actual damage in this specific case be expected to compensate other parties unless it can be shown that the carpet cleaning company inflicted the same damage on others through a common fault of their own, for example, supplying mislabeled (kerosene filled) cleaning fluid containers to all of its carper cleaners, i.e., exonerating the carper cleaner dude and opening this up to being a class action case.

    There's a big difference between putting oneself or others at risk and initiating an an action that actually causes damage. In the Adobe case the guy losing the files put himself and his livelihood at risk by not safeguarding his personal property. Adobe put its users at risk by inadequately testing its software. But it was still Adobe's software that (allegedly) caused the damage here. Some sort of compensation is justified, but it's going to be every hard to put a hard number on it without proof of the value of what was damaged. The recklessness with which both parties conducted themselves leading up to the damage should be considered. Maybe give the guy a free subscription to Adobe for one year, and maybe a sticker.
    The analogy isn't bad, but given the guy moving the cache to the drive with the only copy of the valuable files, it's more like the guy with the painting rolled it up and leaned it against the carpet cleaning machine, though, thinking what could possibly go wrong while doing so.

    I'm onboard with giving the guy a free year of Adobe service. Less sold on it plus the sticker.
    edited November 2018
  • Reply 46 of 61
    polymniapolymnia Posts: 1,080member
    ecarlseen said:
    Can everyone quit slagging the guy for not having sufficient backup? Should he have had it? Definitely. But there's absolutely, positively zero excuse for vendors like Adobe (and Microsoft last month with the Windows 10 update) playing so absurdly fast and loose with customer data. These software vendors are forcing their customers into far more expensive subscription pricing models in a vain attempt to maintain revenue growth and correspondingly high stock prices for just a little bit longer, which is sketchy enough, but they're also getting much worse at quality control in the process, which is flat-out evil. Adobe has been one of the worst custodians of IT quality and security in the history of computing with their egregiously and shamelessly poor stewardship of the Flash plugin. Microsoft infamously fired most of their QA personnel a few years ago in order to foist that work onto their "insider" fan base, which has made their extremely poor reputation in that are decline even further. Yes, users do stupid things, but in cases like this we need to focus hard on the deeply evil neglect that certain software vendors have had for our data as well.
    I’m enjoying an adobe related post that isn’t slagging on Adobe. 
  • Reply 47 of 61
    jbdragonjbdragon Posts: 2,305member
    I have to say that if you’re a so called professional photographer you should have a number of backups.  It’s your business and losing pictures is not good for business.

    for myself, I have all my pictures auto go onto my windows pc though Apples iCloud app.  So anything on my iPad or iPhone ends up on my pc.  That’s 1 backup.  I use Carbonite to backup a number of folders on my pc including my pictures.  That’s another backup off site.   Plus my pictures are in iCloud.  That’s a backup.  They’re also on Amazon Photes which will do full backups of your pictures if your a prime member.  Google does free backups, though will compress the pictures a little bit.

    There are so so many easy things you can do.   There’s no excuses which it comes to pictures.  Because so many places will store all your pictures for FREE.  I’m just a normal person.   It’s not my career.   He should have known better.  Everyone should have backups of content that they don’t want to risk losing.  My NAS has over 13TB of Data on it.  The only practical way to back that up is another NAS, and so Ijave a second NAS just for backups.   It powers up a couple times a week and my main NAS will backup to it using rsync late at night.

    In fact recently at work, we’re not a huge business, small family owned food factory,  we not only have a local backup that backup every hour, but recently started a remote backup to the owners house to the new NAS we got for him.  It backups every night.   There’s not a ton of data to backup, but it’s important.  So a local backup and a offsite backup.  These are things everyone should be doing.  No excuse to not have a backup these days.  For me, it’s all automatic. For the most part, other then like for Amazon, I have to have their app running and up front. Doesn’t work in the background like for Apple.  Same for Google.  Not using your device, start up the app and let it do its thing.  But since it’s on iCloud  and then to my desktop, and then Carbonite, it’s already pretty safe.

    How much Adobe is at fault?  But 5 million, that’s funny!!!  I don't think he should get a dime,  backing up is computer 101.  Everyone knows they should do it, but so few people actually do.   This is on him being a idiot.  Trusting his whole business with no backups of this very important data that you can't get back.  It's just so foolish.  If I was one of his customers, I would go back.  Clearly doesn't care about his data at all.  You may want to get some more pictures you did in the past with him and now all he can say is, oh well, they got lost!!!   Backups have saved me a number of times over the years.   Back up your data!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  • Reply 48 of 61
    I have absolutely no sympathy for the guy.  Your files are your responsibility. If they are valuable, and you don't care enough to protect them too bad, don't be stupid next time.  I keep all my working files on a thunderbolt raid drive then hourly back them up to 3 separate NAS raid units.  Nightly everything gets synced to a B2 cloud account.  I do that because they are valuable to me, and I don't want to loose them.  There are just so many things that can go wrong, anyone willing keep files without backup for what 7 years is just asking for trouble, or looking for someone to sue.  Hoping for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
  • Reply 49 of 61
    zoetmbzoetmb Posts: 2,654member
    ecarlseen said:
    Can everyone quit slagging the guy for not having sufficient backup? Should he have had it? Definitely. But there's absolutely, positively zero excuse for vendors like Adobe (and Microsoft last month with the Windows 10 update) playing so absurdly fast and loose with customer data. These software vendors are forcing their customers into far more expensive subscription pricing models in a vain attempt to maintain revenue growth and correspondingly high stock prices for just a little bit longer, which is sketchy enough, but they're also getting much worse at quality control in the process, which is flat-out evil. Adobe has been one of the worst custodians of IT quality and security in the history of computing with their egregiously and shamelessly poor stewardship of the Flash plugin. Microsoft infamously fired most of their QA personnel a few years ago in order to foist that work onto their "insider" fan base, which has made their extremely poor reputation in that are decline even further. Yes, users do stupid things, but in cases like this we need to focus hard on the deeply evil neglect that certain software vendors have had for our data as well.
    All the more reason why you should have a good backup. Adobe had a part in this, for sure, but not a $5M part, as data security has always been, and should always be, the user's sole provenance.
    Problem for Adobe, is that it is gonna have to say in his user agreement that they are not responsible for any lose of data/information, because our engineers can't design a system that could keep you data being wiped out. That is not something a (((pro))) grade software company should say.
    It does say in the user agreement that they are not responsible for the loss of data or information. So does your macOS and iOS license, and literally every other software license I have read for the last 30 years.
    And every parking lot or garage you park your car in also has a sign or notice on the receipt that they're not responsible for any damage to your car, but in actuality, in most states, they are.   Just because they forced you to approve their licensing agreement (which the court knows no one ever reads) doesn't mean you can't sue them and win.   IMO, Adobe is in the wrong here - no software should ever damage or delete a file other than their own files that one is currently working on.   
  • Reply 50 of 61
    sflocalsflocal Posts: 6,092member
    I'm really surprised at how people expect software and/or hardware to work perfectly so that they never have to feel responsible for backing up their data.  Consider ourselves lucky that hard drives and software have reached a level of reliability that it makes people feel complacent.

    It's that kind of mentality that will be your undoing.

    Backing up your data sends a message to yourself that you are solely responsible for it.  You are your data's custodian.  It reminds you that you do not take any chances or place trust in equipment, or in other people and their software to reliably keep your valuable data in check.

    Sure, Adobe screwed up.  Their TOS indemnifies them.  Hard drives fail and wear out,  Power surges can destroy a connected computer or hard drive.

    If you're someone that makes a living using a computer, then it is inexcusable to claim ignorance in not knowing how to properly back up your wok in case of a disaster.  It's INEXCUSABLE!  Heck, pay someone for a day or two to set up your backup system.  Stop defending this photographer and stop blaming Adobe.  Adobe is no saint, but Adobe is just one percent of all the other ways this "photographer" could have lost his data.  By blaming others, you're simply in denial.
  • Reply 51 of 61
    MplsP said:
    It's baffling to me why he didn't have a backup, but it well may have been that his backup server was full and he needed to get another hard drive, or he thought he had it set up and found out it wasn't backing up the way he thought. I can think of plenty of scenarios aside from him just being sloppy.

    To me this is something akin to Ford having a steering defect and someone getting injured in a crash because they weren't wearing a seatbelt. Should they have their seatbelt on? Definitely, but the steering defect still caused the crash.
    If someone caused something, and if they are to blame for it, aren’t always coupled together though.

    If someone knew about the bug before the software was released, then someone somewhere is definitely to be blamed; and if the company didn’t take reasonable precautions to avoid something like this happening, then someone somewhere should be blamed.

    But… even if we do have someone to blame, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we didn’t do something stupid for the fallout to be as bad as it was.

    So… a “reasonable” result of something like this is that at the end he wins, but gets awarded nothing but having to pay his own lawyers. Sadly, that makes it cost effective for the sued company to just settle, to save money; which is why we have silliness like this going on in some parts of the world.

    (And… NO really “professional” photographer would ever work without a professional level of backups. He should be laughed at, and thrown in jail for about a week for wasting the courts time.)
  • Reply 52 of 61
    volcan said:
    MacPro said:
    The way I see it is, the higher the amount claimed as a loss the more import it shows a back up was required. So it seems a self-defeating claim IMHO.
    This a class action suit. The users would probably only make peanuts. The lion's share goes to the law firm representing them.
     
    My attorney told me that any lawyer who specifies the amount of damages in advance of a trial or settlement is incompetent.
    Perhaps not incompetent as much as playing a game to make profits out of the system, rather than “justice”.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if this case came about just because he was complaining about what happened in the general vicinity of a certain type of greedy lawyer.
  • Reply 53 of 61
    Mike WuertheleMike Wuerthele Posts: 6,858administrator
    zoetmb said:
    ecarlseen said:
    Can everyone quit slagging the guy for not having sufficient backup? Should he have had it? Definitely. But there's absolutely, positively zero excuse for vendors like Adobe (and Microsoft last month with the Windows 10 update) playing so absurdly fast and loose with customer data. These software vendors are forcing their customers into far more expensive subscription pricing models in a vain attempt to maintain revenue growth and correspondingly high stock prices for just a little bit longer, which is sketchy enough, but they're also getting much worse at quality control in the process, which is flat-out evil. Adobe has been one of the worst custodians of IT quality and security in the history of computing with their egregiously and shamelessly poor stewardship of the Flash plugin. Microsoft infamously fired most of their QA personnel a few years ago in order to foist that work onto their "insider" fan base, which has made their extremely poor reputation in that are decline even further. Yes, users do stupid things, but in cases like this we need to focus hard on the deeply evil neglect that certain software vendors have had for our data as well.
    All the more reason why you should have a good backup. Adobe had a part in this, for sure, but not a $5M part, as data security has always been, and should always be, the user's sole provenance.
    Problem for Adobe, is that it is gonna have to say in his user agreement that they are not responsible for any lose of data/information, because our engineers can't design a system that could keep you data being wiped out. That is not something a (((pro))) grade software company should say.
    It does say in the user agreement that they are not responsible for the loss of data or information. So does your macOS and iOS license, and literally every other software license I have read for the last 30 years.
    And every parking lot or garage you park your car in also has a sign or notice on the receipt that they're not responsible for any damage to your car, but in actuality, in most states, they are.   Just because they forced you to approve their licensing agreement (which the court knows no one ever reads) doesn't mean you can't sue them and win.   IMO, Adobe is in the wrong here - no software should ever damage or delete a file other than their own files that one is currently working on.   
    The courts have historically seen garage terms of service and software terms of services in different lights legally. Also, in this case, there was a chain of events that the user undertook which caused the loss, up to and including manually emptying the caches.

    We agree that the bug isn't great. However, as we've said before, and the courts have maintained for 30 years, the user is solely responsible for personal or professional data, regardless of bugs.
  • Reply 54 of 61
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    It's in the users best interest to have a backup, and I'd hesitate to do business with someone who didn't make backups, but that doesn't even slightly mean Adobe should get off the hook for a pretty horrendous sounding bug.  
  • Reply 55 of 61
    I drove behind a gravel truck yesterday, with a tattered sign on the back, "Not responsible for broken windshields." I guess that covers it. Anything you don't want to pay for, just put up a sign. I'm going to scrawl that in the margins of my tax return, "Not responsible for miscalculations". Then I'm covered.
  • Reply 56 of 61
    What is with all the snarky comments?
    I wonder how many of you have actual backups in the legitimate IT sense of the term. And how many of you just shuffle your finished projects off to a big drive that sits next to your computer?

    This is just victim blaming, when truth be told, Adobe has been doing a very sloppy job with it's products lately.
    The latest version of Bridge is utter garbage. Creating duplicates and refusing to let me cleanly eject SD cards without closing the program. 
    Luckily I'd only upgraded on one of my Macs, so I could still fall back to the other one for reviewing/batching my clients photos. 

    Returning to the subject of backups. If you rely on time machine for backup, you are deluded. That is a flimsy safety net with a number of known flaws. 
    If you are using a near line 'backup' such as one of WD's products, I certainly hope you were smart enough not to buy a box with only one disk in it. Too many photography and video pros that I know just buy the biggest single disk they can find online. Not budgeting for a fault tolerant solution. Such as a raid 1 or raid 5 array. 
    Do you back up offsite? 
    In the event of a natural disaster, fire or even a massive power surge, are you protected? There are a number of solutions out there that let you sync your local files to storage in the cloud. This can be cheap and slow, or expensive and fast. Most offer workgroup pricing and storage tiers to suit many use cases. 
    You can even knit together something approaching a safety net with a combination of Google Drive, iCloud and Adobe's CC storage. 

    But pilloring this guy because he does not have backups? I am sorry, I know pro editors, photogs and videographers that have no clue in this regard, and think that is something digi-techs worry about. 
  • Reply 57 of 61
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    What is with all the snarky comments?
    You must be new here.
    fastasleep
  • Reply 58 of 61
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    By "here", I mean the internet./
  • Reply 59 of 61
    ecarlseen said:
    Can everyone quit slagging the guy for not having sufficient backup? Should he have had it? Definitely. But there's absolutely, positively zero excuse for vendors like Adobe (and Microsoft last month with the Windows 10 update) playing so absurdly fast and loose with customer data. These software vendors are forcing their customers into far more expensive subscription pricing models in a vain attempt to maintain revenue growth and correspondingly high stock prices for just a little bit longer, which is sketchy enough, but they're also getting much worse at quality control in the process, which is flat-out evil. Adobe has been one of the worst custodians of IT quality and security in the history of computing with their egregiously and shamelessly poor stewardship of the Flash plugin. Microsoft infamously fired most of their QA personnel a few years ago in order to foist that work onto their "insider" fan base, which has made their extremely poor reputation in that are decline even further. Yes, users do stupid things, but in cases like this we need to focus hard on the deeply evil neglect that certain software vendors have had for our data as well.
    All the more reason why you should have a good backup. Adobe had a part in this, for sure, but not a $5M part, as data security has always been, and should always be, the user's sole provenance.
    Problem for Adobe, is that it is gonna have to say in his user agreement that they are not responsible for any lose of data/information, because our engineers can't design a system that could keep you data being wiped out. That is not something a (((pro))) grade software company should say.
    It does say in the user agreement that they are not responsible for the loss of data or information. So does your macOS and iOS license, and literally every other software license I have read for the last 30 years.
    Yes but one doesn't expect that to apply to files that are not being worked on. Even if he backed up to the cloud using something like iCloud, it would have erased his files from the backup as well, since most cloud services sync their data. Moreover, his external drive might've been a RAID5 or a Mirror, which is technically a live backup and would've done the same thing. 
    You are confusing iCloud with a backup service (or workflow).
    Sync <> Backup.
    fastasleep
  • Reply 60 of 61
    First he should have backup.  No real pro has no backup, especially on hardware prone to failure with age.  

    Second, file recovery utilities could recover most if the data.  

    Third valuation of content is so subjective. 

    And forth, software worked as designed.  Putting cache in same folder as data is just poor decision making.  App purged cache folder per design.  You don't cache with the actual data.  I always assumed that software would purge folder I tell system is cache.  

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