Warning: Lost a big PDF with notes and comments, never trust Document Cloud!

[Anguel]

I am really, really angy and just wanted to warn other users: I used to save big documents and PDF books in Adobe Document cloud and comment on them. This way I could access them from multiple devices. Because I don't trust any cloud service 100% I used to make backups from time to time which unfortunately includes many manual steps when using Document Cloud. Unfortuantely, my last backup was made a couple of days ago so I lost a lot of work.

What happend yesterday was something that I really did not expect from a so called "professional" document (!) cloud service: Acrobat DC became completely unresponsive during a save of the big PDF document into the cloud. After restarting I thought that I can simply reopen the doc but then I got a simple message that the file is damaged and cannot be recovered. Everything was simply gone! There is no backup and there is no way to recover the document. What I did not expect is that Document Cloud removes the last working PDF before having saved the new version successfully. I regard this gross negligence on Adobe's side and I am really angy how such a thing is possible to happen...

[try67]

That's horrible. Yes, unfortunately DC has quite limited functionalities, compared to other online file storage services.

Google Drive, for example, will automatically keep a copy of older versions (if you tell it to) when you upload a file that already exists on the cloud, so if something goes wrong you can always go back to an earlier version. Of course, this nifty feature can easily cause your storage to be full, if you upload heavy files often, but it's a great feature nonetheless for backup purposes. Adobe DC does not have such a feature, so if something goes wrong with your file, you have a problem...

[Anguel]

Thanks @try67 . Good to know about Google Drive. I would really appreciate an official answer from Adobe employees on this topic but I think there is simply nothing to add. It is an insult on its paying customers to implement such a design that can fail and they know it can fail but simply ignore this fact and continue to pretend it is a way to safely store your important documents. Losing documents in such a stupid way and not offering at least some straight forward local backups is a complete failure.

[try67]

Keep us updated on what they say, please!
And I totally agree. Such a system must have a fail-safe mechanism, either in the form of saving old versions (like Google Drive does), and/or in the form of keeping a temporary copy of the file you're overwriting until the new version is fully uploaded.