Full Adobe data loss after conversion of CC Individual to CC Teams, despite Sales promising otherwis

[tiny frog]

Awful day today at work. I've been an Adobe Creative Cloud user for +10 years and trusted the software and the suite.

Last year, I've signed up for a CC for Individuals account for my company because I was the only person who was going to be using the software for a while. Besides getting the benefits of the suite, we've happily transferred our full photography catalog (+40GB, thousands of photos organized, retouched and catalogued) to Lightroom CC and enjoyed the advantages having a cloud synced photography library on the go.

Those were the good times.

The company has since grown and we wanted to add more CC licenses to our company who could share access to the same files and photo library amongst other things. To that purpose we requested a migration of our CC for Individuals account to CC for Teams via Support so that we could easily manage more seats and licenses. The Support agent was very fast and helpful and reassured us multiple times that they would take care of the data conversion of all our Adobe cloud assets, that it would be transferred to the new account allowing us to work uninterrupted and that no data would be lost in the process. This sounded so good! Seamless! Safe! Magic!

They initiated the conversion and everything went very smoothly...

...and then things went downhill very, very fast.

After the CC for Teams accounts was enabled, I've logged in right away to the Admin Console to check everything.

The account status said that we used 0B out of our new 1TB of space. I thought, huh, weird, maybe the migration is not as immediate as we thought? Just in case I checked in with the sales agent who was still there in the cat. They said that I would see an option for the migration in the Admin Console, and that their support team would help me and transferred me to someone else. 

You can guess where this goes.

Long story short, the second agent cheerfully suggested that we should do a manual data transfer. MANUAL? OK, not the end of the world, I thought. It will take us an hour or two and then we'll be back on the road.

Then the help article they shared told that with a manual transfer we would be directly exposed to information loss as e.g. Lightroom CC manual migration does not carry over photo ratings and flags which are critical in our workflow as our collection is meticulously catalogued. 

So a part of our data would be lost already!!! After raising the valid point that neither this partial loss nor dealing with the manual transfer was not what we were promised when we were inquiring multiple times about assurances with data transfer during the CC Teams purchase, second support agent then transferred us to a third one.

Agent number 3 also tried sending some help articles over which we already frantically studied as it had been over an hour since we initiated the conversion. They've suggested a bunch of other things that we've obediently tried such as logging out and in of the account multiple times with no avail. At this point, even the manual data transfer seemed like a good option despite the days or weeks it would take us to manually review our whole collection again...

...but SURPRISE! When we logged into Lightroom Web again and chosen the personal profile, the previous CC Individuals account under the same email where all of the photos were stored before... it was fully empty. Lightroom web innocently suggested that maybe we should upload some photos.

And that's where the story ends. They supposedly escalated the issue to literally an "escalation team" with absolutely no information as to how long it would take them to reach back to us nor whether we have just lost years of work because we wanted to buy more subscription licenses with Adobe.

I now have my heart still waiting for the phone to ring or the email to ping. Probably won't be today, it's Friday afternoon after all. Maybe not even Monday. They don't know when they might contact us, so who knows, right?

So buyers beware. Never trust the cloud, specially if it's the Adobe Creative cloud, and don't repeat our mistakes.

And for god's sake, please do local backups that you can touch and put in a closet somewhere because you never know what can happen if you suddenly decide you want to pay more money to one of your cloud providers for a service that literally has the word "Cloud" as part of its name. Clouds can just vanish in the air on a sunny day.

[tiny frog · Accepted solution]

UPDATE: We have solved this by ourselves (with no help from Adobe but a lot of help from the Adobe Community). 

Here's what worked for us to preserve and transfer our full Lightroom CC library with the actual structure (albums, original photos, edits, ratings, everything) when migrating from a CC for Individuals to a CC for Teams account in case anyone lands at this thread in the future:

 
PART 1. Getting access to our Lightroom photos back again after the conversion from CC for Individuals to CC for Teams

1. There is no "automated asset migration" when converting your CC for Individuals to CC for Teams account via Adobe Support. Do not trust any support agents claiming that it's possible because they aren't aware it seemingly only applies to Enterprise accounts, not Teams. 
2. If you do the conversion that support offers it basically means they automatically cancel your past subscription and reimburse you for the pending days of the month with no penalty fees even if it's mid-cycle in the year and open the new Teams subscription for the same email that becomes admin of the new CC for Teams subscription to manage further licenses.
3. However this blocks your access to your Lightroom library via cloud on the old CC for Individuals account!(which is what we went through with all our photos seemingly disappearing from Lightroom CC on the web, where we used it, on the previous individual account and we had no local backups at that stage). 
4. Even if you did the conversion and lost access to your Lightroom photos as we did just sign up your old individual account for a CC for Individuals photo/Lightroom only subscription just to access your Lightroom photos, you can cancel it within 14 days with no penalties.
5. You should be able to access your old account with all the Lightroom photos at this stage.

PART 2. Migrating the full Lightroom CC library from one Adobe account to any another

1. The official Adobe help article that the support agents send for this purpose (it is based on using the Adobe Lightroom Downloader) is not the best solution. You lose your album organization, your ratings, your flags... If your workflow depends on this it can take days to re-do.
2. Follow the steps in this life-saving comment we have found right here on the forums to backup all of your library info including original photos via Lightroom Classic on your hard drive and then use that full catalog to import ("migrate") from it within Lightroom CC of the new account: https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-ecosystem-cloud-based-discussions/how-to-move-lightroom-cc-...  (thanks rzaza!!!)
3. It take a while to resync everything but it WORKED! All of our photos were finally safe and synced on the new CC for Teams account.
4. THEN DO MULTIPLE LOCAL BACKUPS OF EVERYTHING AND DON'T TRUST ADOBE SALES/SUPPORT IN REGARDS TO YOUR DATA SAFETY CONCERNS. Do trust the Adobe Community where you'll find better quality help from real users running into the same problem as you than in the official support articles.