Known Participant

Question

Media files deleted after 2017.1 upgrade

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
April 21, 2017
25 replies
26885 views

This may be a coincidence, but it's a mighty big one at that. I upgraded this afternoon and opened my most recent project. I went through the new features and then looked into the Preferences to see if there was anything new. Arriving at the Media Cache tab I decided click on "clean unused" Media Cache Database. That's something I've done in previous versions. Then I closed the open project and opened another I had finished last week. Surprise, all media files were missing. I checked the original file's directory. All of the root and subfolders were intact. However, when I looked in the clip folder all of the .MXF files were gone, leaving just the .xmp and .XML. Every folder, in every project that was shot in AVCHD or XAVC (except for the one that was initially open) was missing the media files. Not only that, but I found FCP 7 Capture scratch folders emptied except for the autosave vault. There were other media files missing as well including mp4 exports, and some but not all .mov exports from every project. Also missing are from a foder are .img files containing DVD images. Unexplainably, some ProRes files recorded on Atomos were untouched, as well as other's that were transcodes from XAVC to ProRes.

I contacted Adobe Support via chat. The agent told me that it was not possible for the "clean unused" function to cause all the deletions. You can specify the media cache directory to be cleaned and in my case it was definitely not the root of the drive, nor any of the media folders. He said that nobody has reported this issue so far.

All of my media is on a two drive RAID and that was the only drive effected. The good news is that all of my media is backed up, sometimes twice for the most important clients. Of course restoring all that media will take hours. Before I do that I'm running a file restoration program (that also takes hours).

Finally, the "clean unused" command may have nothing to do with it, but the fact that no media was deleted from the open project is suspicious.

premire pro 2017

This topic has been closed for replies.

nickmichael

Known Participant

(Edited for content). If it had happened to me to the degree that it burned some of the users who posted here, especially when these things happen to us in the process of being Unpaid Beta-Testers.

Moderator note: Please do not discuss legal issues. They are against our community guidelines.

24882966

Participant

Edit: deleted message.

mntbloom

Participating Frequently

Maybe it's just therapy at this point... but weeks later and I'm still discovering things that are missing, still finding things broken, still facing daily reminders about what was removed/broken. Does ANYONE know if Adobe is going to do anything about this (beyond the fix...)

Again, maybe no one else is still following this thread... but I check often to see if there is any further action from Adobe.

Still dejected.

mb

R Neil Haugen

Legend

I know they followed up with a bunch of people ... did you contact Kevin-Monahan or RameezKhan about this?

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

mntbloom

Participating Frequently

Add another one to the list... my deletions happened at 2pm on May 17th...

In another thread, Adobe said they were "Sorry for this issue..."

Sorry for this issue??? SORRY FOR THIS ISSUE!?!??!!?!?! EVERY SINGLE FILE IN EVERY SINGLE MEDIA DIRECTORY ON THE DRIVE I SHARED WITH THE CACHE FOLDER IS GONE. MY VACATION PHOTOS? GONE. MY CAMERA BACKUPS? GONE. MY ENTIRE iTUNES LIBRARY???? GONE.

Oh, but this is the winner... My DROPBOX FOLDER was in the same location... Guess what happened??? ALL GONE!!!! Folders there, files GONE. Oh, and thanks to Dropbox's syncing, all the files on DROPBOX WERE DELETED TOO!!!!!!!!

I do NOT accept your apology.

Extremely unhappy, utterly freaked out, and just completely crushed.

12 hours after I posted this - I've spent over $200 on recovery software (EaseUS and Stellar Phoenix) and have recovered about 1/3 of my assets. Dropbox was able to restore the files on May 18th, but I thought it was a DropBox issue at the time... so I didn't check other directories. The restore of my DropBox surely added to the corruption of the other deleted files... so frustrated. If I'd caught it right away, I might have been able to save... but essentially, 2/3 of everything on that drive, older than 90 days from May 10th, or so is gone.

Yeah yeah... backups... but this is not right.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

Have you contacted Kevin Monahan, Product Support Manager for PrPro? If not, please do so ... and I'll "ping" him here.

Kevin-Monahan

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

D

davecooperphoto

Participating Frequently

I've just messaged Kevin. Thanks for the heads up.

T

Tara T

Participating Frequently

Some thoughts on this incident - I really empathize with those who've lost data. I lost over 500GB of data, but fortunately had multiple backups and was able to restore them. For a few weeks I thought it was a System Mechanic defrag on my PC's data drive that had caused the data loss, until I found this thread. Despite multiple attempts to get support from System Mechanic, they have never made any effort to respond, however as soon as Adobe was aware of the problem they did everything they could to reach out to people here, and to contact all customers through email. 11.1.0 was the version with the deletion problem, 11.1.1 fixed that problem, and 11.1.2 has multiple fixes and enhancements. They have also put in a lot of effort to improve their notification process, and I would suspect there are changes in testing being implemented too.

I've never trusted a mirroring backup system, and manually backup everything using WinMerge. I compare what's on my master to what's on my backup, and if something is on the backup but not the master, I check to see if I really deleted it from the master, or if it indicates a data loss that needs to be restored from the backup. It's more trouble than just letting everything backup automatically, but in a situation like this it can make all the difference. I realize that won't bring back your data, but it might prevent a future data loss.

Patrick J. Palmer

Adobe Employee

Hello everyone,

We wanted to update you on the current status of the Media Cache workflow.

We have an update to Premiere Pro CC 2017.1 (11.1.x) in the pipeline that will be released very shortly. It will include additional measures to safeguard the Media Cache workflow beyond what’s already released with 11.1.1. It’s an update highly recommended by the Premiere Pro team.

The most important change is that only media cache files of a known file type (such as *.pek, *.ims and *.cfa) will be deleted according to the cache management preference. The folders they are in will remain on the system. Additionally, the Media Cache management will be off by default – a lot of users have requested to switch to an opt-in model, and that’s what it’s going to be moving forward.

This next update will also include a number of performance improvements and bug fixes in other areas, and it will include support for the 10 bit formats of the Panasonic GH-5.

Stay tuned for more info which we’ll post to the blog:

https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/tag/adobe-premiere-pro-cc/?segment=dva

Patrick J. Palmer

Adobe Employee

Quick update: 11.1.2 went out this morning. Here's the blog post listing all the improvements and fixes that went into this release:

Premiere Pro 11.1.2 available today – ciritical update, highly recommended | Creative Cloud blog by Adobe

KeulerB

Inspiring

Hello Mr. Palmer,

I wanted to personally thank you and your team for not only taking care of this very serious matter by supplying the .1 update, but to take it much further with the .2 update is amazing. I also want to thank you for making yourself accessible to us all and for being what appears to be the "point person" to go to with our issues and feelings. I realize you are not here to be Tech Support, but it gives me great pleasure to know that you are here to not only answer for what happened, but to stay on top of the situation by seeing to a fix and to keep us informed about it. It makes my connection with Adobe more personal rather than feeling like a number in a phone cue.

I applaud you and your team and am looking forward to putting this behind us and getting back to enjoying your amazing software.

Sincerely,

Rob Keuler

Patrick J. Palmer

Adobe Employee

I’m Patrick, the product manager for Premiere Pro CC and Adobe Media Encoder CC.

Regarding recent issues associated with our Media Cache management feature, I’d like to apologize on behalf of the entire Premiere Pro / AME team unreservedly for any inconvenience the we caused.

The new Media Cache feature was intended to remove unneeded system generated cache files, which was a long standing user request. During testing of this feature we didn't cover all scenarios and the various workflows where the cache is not in the default location, which caused media deletion in some cases. The update (Version 11.1.1 ) we have released on May 17th, 2017 fixes the problem.

During this situation we also discovered problems in our ability to rapidly communicate directly with our users. We’re working on finding ways to make these communications faster and more effective moving forward. We appreciate all the input you’ve provided on the process – please keep it coming.

We as a company feel that direct feedback is the most helpful and I’ve connected with many of you who have provided invaluable feedback . If I haven’t spoken to you yet and if you’re willing to share feedback, please send me a private message and I’ll get in touch as soon as I can.

We deeply care about your experience with our products, and we’ll do our best to make sure you’re not going to experience critical issues like this.

S

Spacecat66

Inspiring

Calling the loss of an entire multi-terabyte volume, essentially years worth of my media team's output (acquired footage, audio, edited video, animation, Premiere and AE projects, scripts, Illustrator and Photoshop artwork, etc, etc), an "inconvenience" is quite the understatement. We're lucky that we had an online backup from which we were able to restore almost all of our work, and that it didn't take longer than 4 days to fully restore. We've reorganized and changed our workflow and archive schemes as a result of this, but it's baffling that something this catastrophic could originate from a media production tool, and that modern operating systems even allow for that level of file privilege with absolutely no user prompting.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

As a fellow user, I SO understand your situation. At least, for me, the presence on these open forums of the new PrPro Project Manager and several of the development team recently is a good change. Just didn't happen before.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

steveh17702721

Known Participant

Hi All,

As a loyal PrPro subscriber for several years now I am appalled at the way Adobe have handled this issue. Through no fault of my own I personally I lost around 2-3Tbs of data (some of which wasn't backed up) my bad! However on a 16tb Raid 5 I foolishly thought that I had at least one back up available therein.

This caused us a very embarrassing delay to our contractual screenings of our current docu film rough cut to the Australian broadcaster and funding organisation.

I think at the VERY LEAST Adobe should offer those affected by this a 6 month free subscription. That would certainly go some way to healing the very real anxiety caused by this drama, and it was a drama...!! not only the initial loss but the ensuing weeks of wondering what was going to happen next. Every time our editor started up the machine we were on tenderhooks wondering what might occur.

Take this on board Adobe and think seriously about it! We are certainly looking at other options after this horrible glitch.

Stephen Hopes

markm98896402

Participant

In the same boat. I came here to update my previous post but I can't find that post. So I'll just post here.

Working on a major documentary...while editing, over 2.4tb of data went off line and was deleted.

I bought and used a recovery tool. $90. It seems to have found everything but the links/pathways were not saved. Making that recovery almost useless. This means I'm going back to a few month old-back up and will put in about 60hrs of unpaid work to get back to where I was. So call it over $2000 out of my pocket because of this issue that Adobe knew about and had time to warn us of.

And no. I did nothing wrong. I have been editing and teaching editing for over 2o years. I'm just appalled. Mark McMinn

al_bergstein

Inspiring

This is just really, really bad. I hope that Adobe's program managers, and legal team, along with their marketing people, get together and contact you all behind the scenes to "make right" this horrible situation. From everything I've read, it appears that the stress test team did not create a scenario that it probably should have found. It does not appear that the scenario that has been described in numerous posts here is outside the box of normal test scenarios. Having been in a major software developer situation, I can tell you that it appears to be a scenario that should have been tested. If I were managing this test team, I would assume they had missed a common scenario.

It would not cost much for Adobe to "make this right" for the limited set of users that have experienced this. To be clear, I am not one of them. Just do it, Adobe.

smalonefee

Participant

The same thing happened to me although I don't believe I lost as much data as some are reporting. I did lose the last several days worth of work. I'm really shocked at what's going on here, and would very much like to know how this could have happened.

For those who might need to recover files, I have found *some* though not even close to all using Piriform's Recuva. Might be helpful for some of you: Recuva - Restore deleted files, even if you've emptied the Recycle bin! - Piriform

I hope Adobe has a good explanation for this and a plan to make it right.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

They already have posted an explanation. It's copied into a couple of the threads on this I know.

As I've always kept the cache/media-cache database and pek files on their own disc, I wasn't going to have the issue. The way others set-up their workflow, unfortunately, made this possible, as when PrPro dumped what it thought were the folders of cache data ... well, not all of those were cache data folders now, were they?

I think it sounds more common in shops where multiple people work on projects over the course of their life, to have everything including the cache files of a project on the same drive structure.

So ... then this happens. Yikes.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

smalonefee

Participant

Perhaps I should rephrase. I'm not looking for "any" explanation, or the basic description of physically how this happened. I'm looking for a credible explanation of how adobe's development process got so screwed up this kind of thing was possible in the first place.

I don't store anything but cache files inside the cache folder, but I do often "store media cache next to project files" to save some local temp drive space as I often transfer between machines and not every one of them has as much free space. It shouldn't matter where I store my other files, though... Adobe should never EVER delete project files like this. Ever.

This shouldn't have ever even been able to happen.

So I'm not just looking for the descriptions Adobe has already provide. I'm looking for a massive apology and some kind of restitution, along with some sense that the company understands what it did is actually extremely damaging especially to people like me who make a living using their products.

T

Tara T

Participating Frequently

Thanks very much Kevin. Maybe it could be added as a "Critical Alert" to the ACC pop-up that alerts customers to new versions.

I am still confused by the description of the problem and fix. I had my data drive on my PC set as the location for my Media Cache. I had two folders of photos totaling over 500GB on that same data drive, the contents of which were deleted. I thought that specifying a drive other than your C:\ for your Media Cache was a good practice. When I updated to 2017.1, I didn't make any changes to the Media Cache settings, yet the info on Avoid potential deletion of media files in Premiere Pro CC 2017 (11.1) says: "... In the default location for media cache preferences, there is no issue. However, incorrect usage of this feature has the potential for unintentional file deletion." I still am unsure how I used it incorrectly, and my biggest concern at this point is that there are others out there whose files have been deleted, and are still recoverable, but from reading the info provided they would have no idea that they needed to check to see if they're missing any files.

Today I started researching the latest best practices for the location of the Media Cache and each of the Scratch Disk folders. In the blog post about the issue it says "...Files that sit next to it will no longer be affected. However, we still strongly recommend keeping the Media Cache folder separate from your original media." Can you tell me why Adobe is recommending that? It seems like the default of the system drive is a bad choice, performance-wise, and there is a check box on the Media Cache preference that says "Save media cache files next to originals when possible", however based on the warning above, I don't understand why that option would be there. Do you recommend housing the media on a separate drive, and the Media Cache on a 3rd drive? Can it have anything else on it or is the warning there because there might still be a problem and other files on that drive might still be deleted by still-buggy software, or is there another reason? If I do use a 3rd drive for the Media Cache, should I specify that for all of the Scratch Disk folders too? If so, is there a way to set those as the default for every project in the same way you can the Media Cache, or do you have to click on each one and change it for every project?

Thanks very much for any info you can provide.

KeulerB

Inspiring

Hi Tara,

Here is what I saw:

The 2015 version of Premiere created the Media Cache and Media Cache Database folders for you when you changed the default directory. The 2017 version did not. So what I think happened was, when you switched to your Media drive, the code thought that the entire drive was your Media Cache location. You can prove this by checking the location in your prefs. The default setting was anything over 90 days old was to be deleted. I had multiple folders and subfolders that had all kinds of picture files and movies that were wiped out. If it was picture or video related, no matter what folder it was in, it was deleted.

If kept to the default location, the folders were created originally by either a previous version and/or by the 2017 version. It gets me as well how Adobe says "Improper Use" as if we hacked the software or something! They coded the software and provided the means to move the Media Cache folder. How is it a user's fault?

Keep your Scratch Disks where they are and try to use even a separate SSD drive for the Media Cache if you're insistant on moving it off the system drive. I did the update and a partial restore keeping the Media Cache in its default location. So far so good.

Bob K.

T

Tara T

Participating Frequently

Thanks Bob. I think you're right, I had G:\ as my Media Cache location, with no folder specified. Interestingly, the first file I discovered was missing my the executable for MPEG Streamclip, which was sitting at the root level on G:\.

One of the bottlenecks on my system (4-year old Alienware laptop with I7 processor, NVIDIA 770 GPU, 16GB of RAM) is that I'll have 100% activity on my C:\ drive, so I'd like to keep the Media Cache files somewhere else. I found a 1TB drive that I can dedicate to that purpose. Do you know if it would be best to specify it as the location for the Media Cache Database too, or should I let that use the default location on C:\?

I am still curious to hear from Kevin why Adobe says "However, we still strongly recommend keeping the Media Cache folder separate from your original media."

Thanks for your help!

Tara

Show more replies

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded