I work in IT doing consulting and we have a saying: “Your data doesn’t exist unless it exists in two places.” And I’ve loved that ever since I first heard it; one of my all-time favorite rules of thumb for dealing with the unpredictability of tech.
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Adobe's Recent Lightroom iOS App Update Deleted User Photos and Lost Data is Unrecoverable
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I dusted off my old copy of Aperture and it feels ancient now. Apple clearly has no interest in beefing up Photos to anywhere near what Aperture could do. Lightroom CC has a slick interface but its feature set is bare minimum. Lightroom Classic is feature rich, but its interface is outdated and it's not a cloud-native application. Pricing plans are ridiculous.
Occasional professional photographer here. Desperately sad for those affected by this bug. Not having a backup is a mistake people tend to make only once - and one that I learned from the hard way.
My own workflow has everything stored on a RAID-1 NAS and backed up nightly to an encrypted “bucket” hosted by Wasabi (it’s cheaper than Amazon!) In theory, even if I lose the NAS I can restore anything for up to a year. Even the decryption keys are stored in two places. One copy at home and one elsewhere.
My own workflow has everything stored on a RAID-1 NAS and backed up nightly to an encrypted “bucket” hosted by Wasabi (it’s cheaper than Amazon!) In theory, even if I lose the NAS I can restore anything for up to a year. Even the decryption keys are stored in two places. One copy at home and one elsewhere.
I always wondered why Apple stopped development. They should have kept at it just to keep the market fair. If I were CEO of Apple tomorrow, I would take those engineers off emoji require them to take the Aperture code out of cold storage and put them in a dark engineering room and thats the only thing they work on.
In terms of iCloud photo library I made a full backup of everything before I migrated to iCloud photo library, just in case something would go wrong.
This is exactly why I have several backups. With multiple local hard drives and cloud backup services in case something failes.
I never trust a single service. Always use multiple for redundancy.
Bring back Aperture! Although actually I get on quite well with Photomechanic and Photoshop now.
I don't believe I was affected because I had ample storage on their server. However, this is happening more often as companies have ditched most of their in-house testing by using their customers as the primary source for product development.
That's why I got an NAS. It's mad to entrust your work to someone like Adobe or some other online cloud thing. I know where my data is and that it's secure, I know I can always have access to it, even when there's no internet connection. I know there's two backups of it, and it's also backed up with Glacier, and old stuff is archived to DVD. If anything happens to it, that's my fault.
I feel for those who lost work and data. We've all been there. Hopefully it'll push them towards proper, robust storage and backup solutions which are easy and affordable these days, and also get them away from Adobe. There's plenty of cheaper and better alternatives.
I feel for those who lost work and data. We've all been there. Hopefully it'll push them towards proper, robust storage and backup solutions which are easy and affordable these days, and also get them away from Adobe. There's plenty of cheaper and better alternatives.
Yeah, I had a backup, but it took me a long while to rebuild the Photos database to the way it was before, since it only selectively deleted pictures. Also it was removing the Live part of some Live Photos. I was like WTF?!? So I had to check lots of photos individually. It was really stupid.
This is one of the things I hate the most about Apple Photos. It does not work on an EXT formatted NAS. It requires a Mac formatted drive. Both Aperture and iTunes are fine backed up to an EXT formatted NAS.
Glad I cancelled my Adobe subscription. Now if only Affinity or somebody like that made a good replacement for Lightroom.
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I'm just grateful that I back everything up in several different places. Plus I never rely on cloud space. All of my edits are done using LRClassic and backed up every night via Backblaze. The only time I'll use the mobile apps is when I work on my iPad and sync it to the cloud and back. It's unfortunate that people lost their photos though.
Just my 2c worth....
I have Sympathy for those who've lost data, particularly those with content that is commercially or sentimentally valuable.
However, There is a lesson to be learnt here. The lesson is simple - ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR DATA.
3-2-1 or 3-2-2 Backup Principals need to be used - not just by professionals, but anybody who uses a computer and places a value (economic or sentimental) on the data created with it.
3-2-1
keep at least three (3) copies of your data
Store two (2) backup copies on different storage media types
Keep one (1) of them located offsite. (Cloud OR geographically separated location)
3-2-2
keep at least three (3) copies of your data
Store two (2) backup copies on different storage media types
Keep two (2) of them located offsite (Cloud AND 1 geographically separated located physical media)
I have Sympathy for those who've lost data, particularly those with content that is commercially or sentimentally valuable.
However, There is a lesson to be learnt here. The lesson is simple - ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR DATA.
3-2-1 or 3-2-2 Backup Principals need to be used - not just by professionals, but anybody who uses a computer and places a value (economic or sentimental) on the data created with it.
3-2-1
keep at least three (3) copies of your data
Store two (2) backup copies on different storage media types
Keep one (1) of them located offsite. (Cloud OR geographically separated location)
3-2-2
keep at least three (3) copies of your data
Store two (2) backup copies on different storage media types
Keep two (2) of them located offsite (Cloud AND 1 geographically separated located physical media)
The issue affected mostly free customers. Those customers whose photos were synced to the cloud did not lose anything. There were a much smaller number of paying customers that lost photos that were not yet synced.
This issue also did not affect 100% of free customers or those paying customers whose photos had not yet synced. The issue occurred when someone had logged into the same device with two or more different Adobe IDs and then launched 5.4.0. We were able to (with Apple's support) get a new build of 5.4.1 out really quickly to prevent more people from being affected and thankfully the total number of affected customers is actually very low.
That doesn't help at all for those customers (paying or otherwise) that lost photos. For that, we truly empathize. A large number of us at Adobe and on the Lightroom team are also photographers and feel the pain quite acutely. Many of us have lost photos in other instances as well (hardware and software failures, lost, flood, etc.).
We have identified the root cause and also identified why it wasn't found in our QE, automation, and beta testing processes and have taken actions to improve our engineering, QE, and release engineering processes to avoid this from happening again in the future.
We're now working to rebuilt the trust lost, and will continue to do so.
Because of course there is no responsibility to be borne by users who let a portable, stealable, breakable device be authoritative and don't make backups. I"m not unsympathetic, but come on now.
I don't want to blame the victim here, because this bug is Adobe's fault.
However, it is mind-boggling to me that someone lost "two years" worth of work. How do you have two years worth of work with no backup?
This won't be the first time a bug caused data loss, and it won't be the last time. And this type of loss isn't unique to Adobe.
However, it is mind-boggling to me that someone lost "two years" worth of work. How do you have two years worth of work with no backup?
This won't be the first time a bug caused data loss, and it won't be the last time. And this type of loss isn't unique to Adobe.
Not true. 32 bit programs work in Mojave. It's Catalina they don't work in, but that's irrelevant as Aperture doesn't run in High Sierra either, so Apple did it on purpose for no disclosed reason.
First, this is why people who really care about their data keep backups, and why no amount of RAID is a backup.
Second, this is literally the second worst bug a piece of software designed to manage content could possibly have.
Adobe's software was stagnant, bloated, and could only be bought as an expensive service, and now you can add "vastly data destructive" to that list. I'd been planning, somewhat reluctantly, to switch to Lightroom for photo management (I get CS through work for free), and I can say for certain now that I never will.
FYI, the worst bug is silently corrupting some but not all user data in cold storage in a way that's not noticeable, so the corruption eventually propagates into all backups before you notice it. A QNAP NAS bug with AFP did that years back--silently corrupted a small percentage of files such that, if you didn't do a complete integrity check on everything you copied to it you wouldn't notice until you eventually opened one of the bad files.
Second, this is literally the second worst bug a piece of software designed to manage content could possibly have.
Adobe's software was stagnant, bloated, and could only be bought as an expensive service, and now you can add "vastly data destructive" to that list. I'd been planning, somewhat reluctantly, to switch to Lightroom for photo management (I get CS through work for free), and I can say for certain now that I never will.
FYI, the worst bug is silently corrupting some but not all user data in cold storage in a way that's not noticeable, so the corruption eventually propagates into all backups before you notice it. A QNAP NAS bug with AFP did that years back--silently corrupted a small percentage of files such that, if you didn't do a complete integrity check on everything you copied to it you wouldn't notice until you eventually opened one of the bad files.
Adobe are still arrogant as though they're the only game in town.
They have more solutions than anyone else, but they've never been as quick to remove bugs as they have been to insert new features.
Feel bad for folks who lost work and personal photos. Echo most of the sentiments about Adobe here.
Looking forward to jumping into Affinity’s software when I buy a new Mac (Just purchased Affinity Photo for my sister too. Glad I steered her away from Adobe).
Looking forward to jumping into Affinity’s software when I buy a new Mac (Just purchased Affinity Photo for my sister too. Glad I steered her away from Adobe).
This. Apple killing Aperture was the reason I moved from the MacBook to a Windows machine...
Aperture was awesome. Photos doesn't even come close and I stay away from Adobe wherever possible, Acrobat Pro being the only exception.
Adobe can keep their overpriced bloatware. At least for photography there are excellent alternatives, which imho are better than Adobe. (Capture1, Affinity,...)
Yet, for the prosumer, Aperture was imho perfect...