DANGER! Creative Cloud Can Corrupt Your Files

[O Gauge Railroading]

We use Creative Cloud among three users in three different states. To say it has been a problem to use reliably would be an understatement. However, today I endured the proverbial straw that broke my back and has caused me to totally abandon this ill-conceived Adobe monstrosity.

Today I attempted to open an InDesign file I had been working on. I had last accessed it via Creative Cloud server two weeks ago. The file would not open. When I examined things more closely, I saw that the .indd file was showing as a ZERO byte file! There were several other files in the same folder showing up with zero bytes. Some were InDesign files and a couple others were PDF files. Obviously the file I wanted and several others were corrupted. And, given the way that the CC server syncs things, the file was also corrupted on the CC server and on the local hard drives of the other two users!

The best part...Adobe has NO BACKUP of files stored on their CC servers! The exact words from the tech support chat transcript was, "...there is no backup of these 0 KB files."

I find that absolutely unbelievable and totally unacceptable...but there is nothing Adobe can or will do. Their flippant Tech Support answer was, "...You need to re-create these files."  Sure...we'll just "recreate" them, no problem. Right? Those files represented MULTIPLE DAYS of work for an important client! This was a typical answer from an [removed ussnorway] in Tech Support who has NO CONCEPT of actually RUNNING A BUSINESS.

Goodbye Creative Cloud. Hello Dropbox (where they keep backups for 120 days.)

[Ussnorway · Accepted solution]

you are correct that Adobe Creative Cloud Can Corrupt Your Files but any network system can do that so making backups is just a fact of life now days... good luck to you

[joanH]

Ussnorwav, You are so right, the moment I could - I save all of my work on DVD and thumb drives. I do not have files in clouds offered by any company and never have. My wisdom about this appeared when floppy discs showed a terrible storage flaw - corruptions with long-held files. We live and learn. Best regards, JH

[AxelMatt]

Saving files in the cloud does not relieve you of the responsibility to back up your data yourself. This applies to all cloud services, including Dropbox

[Abambo]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/R+P+Melvin  wrote

And, given the way that the CC server syncs things, the file was also corrupted on the CC server and on the local hard drives of the other two users!

That's what I would expect to happen. Now, the reason of the bad or corrupted file may well be a problem with one of the computers connected. Dropbox or CC: you should be careful.

Adobe keeps different versions for 10 days.

[Daniel E Lane]

Using Adobe's cloud or Drop box(destroyer) or any other cloud storage is great for moving things between people, especially over distance, but they are not a reliable back-up. When I've been involved in a similar situation. One person was designated as the person who made back-ups of all files on the regular. Tended to be me since I had a lot of extra hard drives laying around. So each night when I was done working, every file on the cloud was backed up to one of my hard drives into a dated folder. That way I not only had back-ups of the files, but I had back-ups going back generations of the files. It came in hand more than once when clients decided they wanted to go back to an earlier version of something. We had it saved, so not a big deal. And any cloud glitches were of no consequence as well. No lost data or corrupted files or anything else.