Snyced cloud files for our team moved to our local team recycling bin

[Sparrowhawk-AES]

When our team members logged on this morning most of our shared file location files were sent to the recycling bin. Here at our company we have built our synced files to be shared so we can back each other up for holidays, sick days, etc.. Now we are creating a separate network location to salvage everything that was sent to our trash on our respective workstations. It was strange that when we logged on this morning all our files "deleted" themselves.

Has this happened to any other teams. My team was in panic but all files are in the trash and can be retreived. Quite distrubing. We recieved no notification that something like this would occur if Adobe initiated the event.  If it was a hack, it only affect our Adobe CC for Teams members.

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

@Sparrowhawk-AES unfortunately anyone on your team who move items in their local sync to trash would have affected the sync upstream to move items in the cloud to the trash.

That being said however, local sync should be disabled for your team already as this feature has reached EOL and is being removed altogether. More likely somone accidentally deleted while in the folder structure. 

I would move your assets to the local network location ASAP - unclear when access to the sycned assets will be fully removed. https://helpx.adobe.com/enterprise/kb/eol-cc-synced-files-for-business-plans.html

Adobe does not touch storage instances and it was not a hack. This was a case of simple human error.

[Sparrowhawk-AES]

Our team has many members but only 4 are active. The shard locations within our organization simply 'deleted' themselves programmatically this morning at logon. My closest team member ran into my office in a panic, "Why are all our files deleted?"  I logged on and then my files started to move to the recycling bin. Only Adobe location files.

[Sparrowhawk-AES]

And not all files in our shared synced location move or were deleted.

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

@Sparrowhawk-AES that would be the expected behavior if one user accidentally deleted something - as the sync propogates it would start removing files for everyone in all locations. We've had this happen ourselves. Not something the system did on it's own.

[Sparrowhawk-AES]

850 various files. Not all but some from most folders. Sometimes the entire folder sometimes only selective items. All deleted 10 minutes after log on. That is common?

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

Yes. The sync starts after you log in and replicates whatever the user did on their system.

[Sparrowhawk-AES]

This is not common. Read the details of the deletion. Selective. Many files. Our team is not large. It isn't difficult to consult our users. The same thing happened on all workstations.

[Sparrowhawk-AES]

I have also found that when synced files are deleted they are available on the cloud and accessible on the web in the "Deleted folder" remaining there for 30 days. This folder is empty as well.

Perhaps our account has simply been hacked.

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

Beleive what you will.

[Sparrowhawk-AES]

I understand what you are explaining to me about the syncing behavior. The event this morning at logon was nothing similar. 850 + files. Portions of directories, select files deleted and landed in the recycling bin. We have gotten used to the adding and deleting of files and how the cloud and sync files behave. This event was not like any of that.

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

In the end, you were able to recover and have a plan to migrate off Adobe synced file storage - that should be the focus now since the service is EOL. There will come a point (TBD) where accessing the cloud sync storage will not be an option.

Technically sync should have been disabled for your team long ago as others have found out the hard way. The goal now is migrating to a new storage solution.

[Sparrowhawk-AES]

This was not simple human error. This was cloud activity that occured through account access point, either on the cloud or on a synced location. Our 2 man team made no move that would cause this type of change and so rapidly. It began the moment each of us logged on to our local machine. 

This event so far has no reasonable explanation at this point. We have "recovered" but have no way of telling if all files were recovered. The 2 common denominators in this event are Adobe Creative cloud shared directories and Cloud syncing.  Direcories and files not shared through the cloud were not affected. Each of our individual files were left untouched. 

We are looking to other cloud based file sharing to prepare for the sync/share feature is going away.

It was not simple human error.