Adobe Bug Deletes $250,000-Worth of Man’s Files

The lawsuit was filed in a California district court last week by Dave Cooper. He states that an update to Premiere Pro came with a flaw that led to the deletion of 500 hours of video clips worth around $250,000. Cooper pointed out that he upgraded to Premiere Pro 11.1.0 in April of last year.

Premiere creates redundant video files that are stored in a “Media Cache” folder while a user is working on a project. This takes up a lot of hard drive space, and Cooper instructed the video editing suite to place the folder inside a “Videos” directory on an external hard drive, according to court documents. The “Videos” folder contained footage that wasn’t associated with a Premiere project, which should’ve been fine. When a user is done working on a project they typically clear the “Media Cache” and move on with their lives. Unfortunately, Cooper says that when he initiated the “Clean Cache” function it indiscriminately deleted the contents of his “Videos” folder forever. 

Cooper claims that he lost around 100,000 individual clips due to the tool’s cleaning of media cache and that it cost him about $250,000 to capture that footage. He spent three days trying to recover the data but then admitted that all was lost, the lawsuit states. The freelancer is seeking “monetary damages, including but not limited to any compensatory, incidental, or consequential damages in an amount that the Court or jury will determine, in accordance with applicable law.” 

Adobe stated that the 11.1.1 update fixed the problem and “only files that are within the Media Cache folder’s subdirectories will be deleted.” Adobe, however, said, “we still strongly recommend keeping the Media Cache folder separate from your original media.” 

Bugs are pretty dangerous these days. Share your own stories in the comments below.