How about this for bizarre bug of the week: the latest version of Adobe Creative Cloud deletes the first hidden directory in root directories on Macs.

That's bad news for users of BackBlaze: the backup software stores a .bzvol folder in the top level of every drive it backs up, and uses these folders to store information about the drives. Adobe's Creative Cloud app wipes away these directories, leaving BackBlaze's users faced with "your drive is no longer backed up" errors.

"We've encountered an issue on the Mac where Adobe Creative Cloud appears to be removing the contents of the first hidden folder at the root of the drive, in alphabetic order. By happenstance, the first hidden folder on most Backblaze customers' internal drive is the .bzvol folder," writes a BackBlaze staffer after a flood of inquiries from customers.

One way to stop this from happening is to run sudo mkdir /.adobedontdeletemybzvol in a Terminal and enter your administrator password. This will create a sacrificial file for Creative Cloud to eat. It'll also stop Adobe's code from destroying other important hidden directories, such as .DocumentRevisions-V100 , used by OS X for versioning files.

Another issue is that Adobe's software may also delete the first file or folder in a root directory that starts with a space character, since that will always appear first in an alphabetical listing and thus fall prey to Creative Cloud.

The deletions are triggered when installing version 3.5.0.206 of the Adobe app, or signing into the cloud service with that build. Adobe has since pulled that download while it investigates the programming cockup.

BackBlaze has made two videos demonstrating the flaw. Remember, always keep backups. And then backup your backups. ®

Youtube Video

Youtube Video