ADOBE HAS ISSUED a fix for a software update that deleted important files off people’s Mac computers, even those that had nothing to do with the software in question.

Its Creative Cloud Desktop application was rolled out last week, but the update ended up removing files from the system’s root directory. In this case, it was the first folder on a user’s machine as listed alphabetically, sometimes being a folder whose name starts off with a space as the first character.

In some cases, the update would delete a folder dedicated to a Mac’s autosave function for documents.

Adobe released an update for both Windows and Mac and said users would be prompted to install it within the next 24 hours if they haven’t done so already.

“We have removed the update from distribution, and are in the process of deploying a new update which addresses the issue,” said Adobe in an earlier statement. “When prompted for the update, Creative Cloud members should install it as normal”.

The issue was originally spotted by data backup service BackBlaze which found out because its hidden folder named ‘.bzvol,’ which it relied on to run its service, was deleted.

After receiving reports about it, it advised users to create a ‘sacrificial folder’ in the root directory as a temporary solution to the problem.

It’s difficult to tell exactly which data may have been removed, but you can open the root directory on your Mac and try to look towards the top of any folders that are empty. This would have occurred to only one folder (that we know of) so the top-most hidden folder or the first folder with a space as the first character would have been affected.

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