Adobe Hell. Thousands of Lost Photos--No Support. Please Help.

[mmholtzman]

Yesterday my husband contacted Adobe to try to troubleshoot an issue with Lightroom not uploading to the cloud, and in the process of the troubleshoot the Adobe employee erased 4 months worth of my husband's professional photography work. Adobe then said they would get back to him in a number of days.

This is a terrible loss for him, so I called to get a quicker response yesterday--was assured by a supervisor that someone would get back to me by the evening, no one did, then I called back in today and was given the run around by a supervisor who was incredibly rude and refused to give me his name!! Now I'm on with another "supervisor" who is simply restating that "it's complicated," and that "someone will be in contact within 24-48 hours."

Is there any way to get in touch with a higher level of support?? This is just unbelievable--to pay so many thousands of dollars to a company that is supposed to cater to professionals and then to be ignored, even after they acknowledge that the fault is theirs??

Can anyone help?

[John T Smith]

Seems to be too late now, but I use a drive housing and multiple external drives to copy important files for backup

A possibility is this USB3 dock with fan to swap drives http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-SuperSpeed-Docking-Station-Cooling/dp/B0055PL2YI or http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147511

I have a box full of "bare" Sata drives that I put in the drive housing so I may have multiple copies of files

[KanikaS]

Moving to Lightroom CC​

[mmholtzman]

Why are you moving to Lightroom? It's a cloud issue, and if you're a team member you should try to help get someone involved, not move this to a place where fewer people are likely to see it. The Lightroom forum has 80 followers.

[selondon]

Try this thread..... Lightroom Mobile Photos Gone

If the photos made it to the Cloud, Peter Baust may be able to help.

[mmholtzman]

Thank you! It's not exactly the same scenario, but will definitely reach out to Peter Baust anyway.

Appreciate your response.

[Jao vdL]

Were you upgrading a Lightroom Classic Library? If so Lightroom Classic should still have all the images in it. For a professional photographer I would recommend against using Lightroom CC and storing your originals in the cloud only. Stick with Classic and make sure you have a good backup strategy for your images and Library. If you really want to use Lightroom CC (which is not ready for professional use in my opinion but opinions vary on this), make sure you use the option to mirror all images to local storage and to have another backup in place.

[kellyt14327759]

They have the worst customer support of all time. I hate them.

[mmholtzman]

I have almost never had a worse customer service experience. We (I, because my husband is working) have been on the phone for hours, and also have contacted Adobe's Facebook and Instagram accounts. They ask for the case number and then you never hear back. I also contacted the Adobe team member, Peter Baust peter-b , mentioned in the link above who seemed to have helped others in a similar situation in the forum, out but haven't had a response--it was a reply to that thread, so I'm messaging again. As far as the original customer support supervisors that were "helping" us, we were supposed to have a call from the engineering team today, and nothing. This evening we received the following email:

Reminder: Your Open Adobe Case ADB-838947-C9Z3 

Dear Marko,

We noticed your customer support case ADB-838947-C9Z3 is still open and we’re waiting for your response.

You contacted us 1/23/2018 2:31 PM about Lightroom CC/Photos Deleted / Lr Web and spoke to  Lakshay Garg.

Please reply to this email or login to your Adobe account to find instructions and view your case. Your case will automatically be closed after 4 days if you don’t respond.

We look forward to working with you,

Adobe Customer Care

Really? And, honestly, it's not even the time spent--my husband's entire body of work over the past four months is gone--he is devastated. And no one cares. An absolute shame.

[JP Hess]

Referring again to Jao Vdl's question above. Did you upgrade to Lightroom CC from Lightroom Classic CC? If you did then you should still have all of that work on your husband's computer. Lightroom CC really isn't ready for a professional to rely on it the way your husband is trying to do so right now. Lightroom Classic CC would be a much better choice.

[mmholtzman]

Hi Jim and Jao, I didn't respond to the initial question because it's not entirely relevant and we're in the midst of dealing with the direct issue at the moment. Marko had just started using Lightroom CC some months ago, but the issue is not so much that it's apparently not stable or reliable (now we know), but that an Adobe tech support team member erased all the files from his cloud.

Of course he appreciates all the suggestions for managing files going forward, and we both thank you for taking the time to share your input, but at the moment we're more concerned with recovering the images, if possible, and with our frustration with Adobe's terrible mistake and worse response.

[Jao vdL]

That is horrible indeed! And what a terrible feeling that must be. Unfortunately only Adobe can help you with this. This forum is just fellow users that are willing to help out but we have no better access to Adobe unfortunately.

Does your computer do automated backups by any chance such as using Apple's timeMachine on Macs or some other automated backup?

[john beardsworth]

Jao and Jim's question is important because your problem doesn't make complete sense. Do you really mean that 4 months of original photos were uploaded to the cloud, and that they weren't backed up before being uploaded?

We also have plenty of experience of users reporting problems which turned out to be entirely different issues from what they thought.

So exactly which version of Lightroom are you using? Saying "Lightroom CC" isn't enough, due to the confusion Adobe have caused by renaming Lightroom products. Please go into Lightroom, and let's see the first line from Help > System Info.

[Jao vdL]

It sounds like their images were not uploading to the cloud in Lightroom CC which is certainly not something out of the ordinary unfortunately. Then they called Adobe support where a support person reset some cloud syncing data which made CC delete months of not yet uploaded images. Those could still be there buried in some hidden folders on their computer but will certainly for all intents and purposes be like they are completely gone.

[john beardsworth]

Maybe , but you are assuming that it is indeed LRCC, and no migration is involved. I wouldn't be so sure, and I think we need clear answers to your previous questions. You know how confusing Adobe have made all this! It seems wrong that an Adobe person would delete content to solve an uploading problem, but if that is indeed the case it confirms my theory about why LRCC was originally shown as Nimbus - Not In My Back Up System

[Jao vdL]

>Nimbus - Not In My Back Up System

That made me laugh. Sad but very true.

[JP Hess]

Truly the perfect acronym!

[Jao vdL]

mprelic,

could you try to go to the preferences screen in Lightroom CC? Click on the local storage tab. Then click on the hard disk name shown right next to "Available space on:" above the space filling bar. The name should light up with a grey lozenge around it when you hover the mouse over it. Click it and you should get a finder/explorer window with a crazily named folder highlighted. Go into this folder and find the originals folder. Dig into this and see if you can find any of the images that you lost. If you do, copy them to another location on your hard disk or to another external disk for safe keeping. Then reimport them from the new location into Lightroom CC.

This is a low probability but it is possible that the files are still there.

[pschefz]

it blows my mind that adobe cant get better tech support....it is a joke.....

i had a similar experience....tech support guy gave me instructions to fix a problem and in one swift swoop my entire cloud was gone....he was apologetic and they gave me a couple of months free service.....i did have all my files backed up, so it was more of a hassle then a real tragedy....

as bad as tech support is, customer support is horrendous....a vicious kafkaesque never ending circle of other layers of people none of which seem to be aware or care about even the simplest existing issue....when i switched to LR CC, i was on month3 of a prepaid yearlong subscription.....i spent 2 months trying to get a credit or something for the remaining 9 months....instead of saying that this was against policy, adobe simply denied that i ever had a plan like it and made me prove it to them....which i was able to do....from that point on it was 4 times the same thing: another person taking all the same information again (incl proof of purchase, code,...) and saying somebody would have to look into it and would get back to me.....of course that never happened....i gave up...at first it was about the money for me....then it was just pure amazement to see how far they would try to drag it out, finally it came down to my time and my sanity being just much too valuable.....

this post reminded me to come up with a better backup solution with LR CC.....

while writing this i realized that i am asking a question and moved it to a new thread