Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Adobe's Recent Lightroom iOS App Update Deleted User Photos and Lost Data is Unrecoverable
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
That is terrifying. I‘ve seen hiccups with iCloud but I can’t even imagine a bug of this magnitude.
Adobe's recent 5.4 update for the Lightroom for iOS app had a major bug in it that deleted user photos and presets, eradicating all content that had not been synced to the Adobe cloud service.
As noted by PetaPixel, complaints surfaced on the Photoshop forums on Monday, shortly after the update was released, followed by similar reports on Reddit and Twitter.
Affected users lost photos, presets, edits, watermarks, and more. One user on Reddit said that he lost two years of edits, and there are dozens of similar complaints from people who lost important data. The problem affected users who were using local storage without having uploaded that content to Adobe's cloud storage service.
Many of those affected were using Adobe's free service, which has limited cloud storage, but some paid users were also impacted and lost thousands of photos.
Adobe on Wednesday released a 5.4.1 update to prevent the bug from affecting additional users, and confirmed at that time that none of the data that was lost is in any way recoverable. From Adobe:Adobe has recommended that affected users try to restore an iCloud backup that might have the lost content, but there's no solution on Adobe's end to address the loss and no fix if there's no iCloud backup.
Article Link: Adobe's Recent Lightroom iOS App Update Deleted User Photos and Lost Data is Unrecoverable
Good luck with that. You should read EULA's before clicking that away.
Well that's why it's called "Light"room. No need to explain what will happen if you light up in a darkroom when processing films.
As the data storage saying goes, you only have your data the amount of backups you have minus one. Only have one backup? Then you got none. Have it redundant twice? Then you got one backup.
Need to vent a bit here.
It bothers me to no end how stuff like this goes through. It is frustrating, infuriating and more.
It happens where are I work at, it happens on games I buy, on every software... “it’s fixed, it’s committed to the build”, try it on my own, it doesn’t work. Update photoshop/AE/random-app? see stuff that was working perfectly fine broken completely with updates not even remotely related the tool broken.
Buy a freshly new game disc, put it in, doesn’t work: it needs 100GB day zero patch to fix it on the ONLY console it was supposed to work and be tested on. Give me a effing break...
We know it’s bad when an update arrives and instead of being a cheerful day with new features and new things to try it’s a scary, backing up stuff, “oh noes what will this break now” day.
/venting over.
Horrendous. I also hope they bring back Aperture. It seems crazy that Apple of all companies would not have such an app anymore. While we're at it, bring back AirPort Extreme/Time Capsule, MagSafe, and optical audio out.
It is oh so nowhere near that simple. If EULAs could protect companies from being forced to settle class action suits caused by gross negligence, it wouldn't be the incredibly lucrative legal business that it is.
adobe's icloud server is pretty useless and unsafe. a couple of years back we lost a lot of files in our office. also you can only sync everything or nothing, so even tho we have 18TBs of icloud storage, there is no way to ever even use it all.
So if you do have a backup of your iOS device (because this bug was on iPhones and iPads only), how can you restore just your lightroom photos? Do you have to restore the entire device from your last backup and then lose anything you did since then on every other app you have? That's one of the issues with iOS backups and the way iOS stores data in general, it's hidden away and there's no clean way to restore just the data for this app or that app.
When you do restore your iOS device it doesn't restore the actual apps from the backup, it reloads them from the app store, so what's to stop the latest version of lightroom (which will be loaded) from deleting all the photos from the backup you just restored?
So saying backup backup backup is great, but it's worth noting that whereas MacOS is fairly easy to backup and takes just a little work to restore what you lost, iOS' black box backup strategy can make recovering from issues like this quite hard.
When you do restore your iOS device it doesn't restore the actual apps from the backup, it reloads them from the app store, so what's to stop the latest version of lightroom (which will be loaded) from deleting all the photos from the backup you just restored?
So saying backup backup backup is great, but it's worth noting that whereas MacOS is fairly easy to backup and takes just a little work to restore what you lost, iOS' black box backup strategy can make recovering from issues like this quite hard.
If you don’t need it for a while, I would offline or delete the App until you know it is safe. And check to see if you lost any photo, then backup your photos!
Yes unlike Timemachine, there is not App only or selective restore. I have a number of iPads, some old, I personally would restore it on there, assuming I have enough storage. Unfortunately, my old devices has less. Full restore from iCloud or a iOS backup on Mac works pretty good, but there is no way to verify what data, or photos are backed up.
I have, except for photoshop followed by lightroom, their programs are very buggy. Forget about Premiere, typically my first video project works great then have a total nightmare on subse projects. Now I don’t know about Lightroom. If Adobe was not buggy and fully supported all Apple photo formats, including Live Photo’s, I might have switched away from Macs. Not much programs handles my 60,000 photos like Apple Photos (or Aperture.)
i don’t understand those that say they have lost years of photos/videos off their smart phone. i can understand losing a few months since their last backup.
You should also read your country's laws before thinking all EULA clauses are legal and enforceable.
There were people that use Adobe's cloud storage but were travelling without sufficient bandwidth to backup to the cloud.
Aperture simply wasn't successful enough nor was it strategic for Apple. In comparison, Final Cut Pro and Logic had achieved some critical mass in professional usage such that Apple felt keeping them competitive was important in order not to piss off professional users (angering one set of professional users damages Apple's position with other professional users) and to have some flagship professional products that provide a halo effect.
The share of amateurs among Aperture's users was probably significantly higher than among Final Cut Pro and Logic users and it probably lost out to Lightroom in terms of market share even on the Mac alone too quickly. Losing market share (and likely never having gained that much compared to Photoshop+Bridge and later Lightroom) made it less attractive financially to invest in and the vicious cycle of falling market share, less investment, and decreasing competitiveness started.
I think the general answer is that with iOS, tons of apps store/sync their data with the cloud anyway such that the actual device backup is less important. But for this specific situation where there is no (Adobe) cloud backup of your LR mobile data (either because none of was set up because it wasn't free or because one didn't have enough bandwidth to upload everything), the procedure is to backup any data in any other app (that isn't backed up or synced with the cloud already) manually and then restore the device backup.
The promise by Adobe that version 5.4.1 fixed this data loss bug.
In the end, the best strategy with iOS is to ensure that as many apps as possible have their own independent sync/backup to the cloud system (which a lot of them do, the question is how many have a backup history).
The only logic the big cats had were the two pairs of Leopard/Snow Leopard and Lion/Mountain Lion. With the place names, there are also two such pairs, Yosemite/El Capitan and Sierra/High Sierra.
Aperture runs perfectly fine in High Sierra (of course, there could be some edge cases I am not aware of).