Adobe Creative Cloud App Deletes Contents of Hidden Folders
The folks at cloud-backup service Backblaze discovered a troubling behavior in Adobe Creative Cloud: an update to Adobe’s Mac software was deleting the contents of the first hidden folder it saw, in alphabetical order, at the root of users’ disks. (Hidden folders aren’t displayed in the Finder, but often contain important settings or other data.) Backblaze users noticed the bug because the Backblaze app depends on a hidden folder called .bzvol, which is often alphabetically the first hidden folder on Backblaze users’ drives. For other Mac users, the first folder would likely have been .DocumentRevisions-V100, which stores data required for OS X’s Auto Save and Versions features — deleting that data could be problematic. Adobe acknowledged the bug and replaced the update quickly, so make sure to let Creative Cloud update itself.
What does "alphabetically" mean in this instance -- case-sensitive or case-insensitive? The results are different in Finder vs ls, for example.
Honestly, we're not sure. Backblaze's workaround has a lowercase a as the first letter.
This evening 2/12/16, Adobe has a blog post which reports "We have removed the update from distribution, and are in the process of deploying a new update which addresses the issue."
http://blogs.adobe.com/adobecare/2016/02/12/creative-cloud-desktop-on-mac-update-issue/
Release notes for the latest Adobe update, 3.5.1.209, say that it contains a bug fix for a problem in 3.5.0.206 that would cause CC to delete "files with user write permission" in the root directory. That suggests the problem went deeper than just BackBlaze's .bzvol directory (or whatever is the "first alphabetically" invisible directory in /) being cleaned out, if there were any other apps creating user-writable files in the root directory.
See https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/release-note/cc-release-notes.html#Version-specific%20release%20notess
I uninstalled Creative Cloud a few months ago, so I'm mightily relieved that I didn't get hit by this bug! (I'm also a recent convert to BackBlaze.) The CC desktop app has always been problematic for me - it frequently got confused as to whether there were updates available, and the installation process invariable slowed my iMac almost to a standstill. I have to wonder how much resources Adobe are putting into its development. Incidents like this one just make me even more determined to move to workflows that aren't reliant on any Adobe products.