That Adobe Creative Cloud bug deleting user data all on its own, without any permission from the user, has been, well, trashed by Adobe.
Thanks to Backblaze for discovering an issue in Adobe's Creative Cloud update, a new fix patches a bug that would delete a user's data without any reason or warning. As explained by Backblaze, Adobe's update bug would delete a user's topmost root folder alphabetically every time the user would sign in to their Creative Cloud account.
The Creative Cloud bug affected Apple's Mac computers by deleting the first folder on a user's Mac, in alphabetical order. There would be no warning nor any reason for the deletions. Once a user installed the Adobe update, files would be going to the trash.
Adobe acknowledges a "small number of cases," but it seems to have been large enough of a problem for the company to pull the buggy update from distribution while assuring Creative Cloud subscribers that its latest update – just outed recently – addresses the issue.
As a result, Adobe says, "When prompted for the update, Creative Cloud members should install it as normal." If auto-update is turned on, Adobe's fix should begin migrating from the cloud to the user's machine and take effect shortly.
It all started that very same way, however. Users who had Creative Cloud auto-update on its own may have lost files within their root directory, especially since no warnings were ever given.
Backblaze, a cloud-based backup tool and service that allows users to backup their data to an offside data center, was the one to discover the bug and report on the matter. The company reveals that the bug leaves a hidden folder named ".bzvol" at the top of each of its customer's drives.
In a majority of cases where its customers had also installed the Creative Cloud update, Backblaze would then notice how that very .bzvol folder would go missing. The company says this error happens very rarely, so when it started happening to multiple users at nearly the same time, they knew something was up.
With customers sending support tickets and tweeting screenshots about the .bzvol folder gone missing, it took Backblaze a few days to root it back to Adobe's Creative Cloud. That's when Backblaze realized it wasn't just its own customers getting affected, it was all Mac users who used the software.
Before Adobe released a fix, Backblaze's solution required a sort of "sacrificial folder" that would lay atop alphabetically over other folders in the root drive of a Mac. When a user would then sign in to their Creative Cloud account, it would be that sacrificial folder that would get eaten up into the trash.
Fortunately, it seems Adobe's fix to the buggy update works and Backblaze's solution is no longer necessary. Nonetheless, that just goes to show how important it is to always backup our data.
