One of the most important things to remember in design is to back-up your work. That being said, sometimes even the those files can be vulnerable to bugs. That’s the case with a freelance videographer who recently filed a class action lawsuit against Adobe.

The mortified users watched his files vanish due to a bug in video-editing software Premiere Pro. The glitch resulted in the deletion of 500 hours of video clips that freelance filmmaker Dave Cooper claims were worth around US$250,000.

Even if this nightmare scenario hasn’t happened to you yet, all Premiere users should take note.

About the Adobe bug

The glitch in question has to do with the 11.1.0 update of Premiere Pro CC 2017, which apparently deleted videos and photos that were never opened or used within the program. The deletion was attributed to Premiere Pro’s clean cache tool, which stores unnecessary data from ongoing projects so users can clear them easily after the work is done.

Dave estimated that the bug had wiped out about 100,000 video clips that were shoot and produced during his travels to locations such as India, Brazil, Egypt, Mexico and Turkey.

The filmmaker’s list of clients includes editorial, advertising, and governmental organizations such as the World Bank, National Geographic, Ogilvy, USAID, and PBS.

The bug didn’t go unnoticed in the Adobe community, with forum users reporting similar issues and warning each other about the bug. Adobe did acknowledge the bug back in May 2017, and has since rolled out an update to prevent future content from being removed by mistake.

“The update changes the behaviour of the media cache deletion. With 11.1.1, only files that are within the ‘Media Cache’ folder’s subdirectories will be deleted. 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,” states Adobe.

Regardless of who’s at fault in this case, and regardless of whether this particular bug affected you, there’s a lesson here for everyone. Make backups upon backups of all your stuff—it sucks, it’s expensive, but it’s essential.

Source: https://designtaxi.com/news/402369/Adobe-Gets-Sued-Over-Bug-That-Deleted-US-250-000-Worth-Of-Freelancer-s-Work/