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Windows 10 October 2018 Update is Deleting User Data For Many (windowscentral.com)
New submitter CaptainPhoton writes: I updated my test PC using the Windows 10 October Update (1809). That seemed safe enough, so I proceeded to upgrade my production PC. I just encountered an issue where everything in the Documents folder was deleted, even though I had clicked the option to keep my files. Everything else in my user profile remains intact. I am curious, how widespread is this issue? Has anyone else here encountered this issue? Some articles are starting to crop up acknowledging this failure. Citing complaints from several users, Windows Central reports: Sometimes, when you perform an upgrade to a new version of Windows 10, the setup may move the user files to the previous installation backup located inside the "Windows.old" folder. However, according to those users experiencing sudden data loss, they looked everywhere, and their personal files are nowhere to be found.
It could be argued that the initial fault was using Windows 10 at all ;)
But the part about the cloud backup was obviously sarcastic...
And to get serious for a moment, things like these are why I back up my files from time to time. I also have them outside the usual, Microsoft-designed scheme for storing user data. The original reasons were
- I want them close to the top level of the file system, not down below three more layers as in C:\Users\Lonewolf666\Documents.
- I want them on a separate partition I can copy as a whole, and that is not impacted if I nuke my C:\ drive for some reason.
But now I see they are much less likely to be hit by stuff like this as well. One more reason.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Except that, unless you
1. Bend over backwards to configure Windows to ask your "permission" before installing updates,
2. Aren't unlucky enough to have Windows throw up a sudden, "Windows wants to install updates... [REBOOT NOW!] learn more" (with "(learn more)" neither appearing to be an obviously-clickable button nor underlined link, printed in a tiny font, and probably inserted into the middle of a longer sentence that itself is neither clickable nor calls obvious attention to itself... and REBOOT NOW! being the default choice that gets selected if you aren't looking at the screen,didn't notice that Windows has rudely grabbed input focus, and press the 'enter' key).
3. Have been making continuous backups (killing much of the performance benefit to having a fast SSD, unless you ALSO have a fast SSD to use for backups as well)
4. Windows doesn't decide to fuck with your backup drive, too (which has to be continuously connected if you want to satisfy requirement #3).
5. You're ALSO doing backups to an external drive that gets physically removed from the computer and locked away, so it won't be affected by ransomware, or get stolen/destroyed as well if you get robbed or your house burns down).
My biggest beef with pretty much every current Windows backup "solution" is the fact that NONE of the ones that are remotely affordable can gracefully deal with what I call, the size/importance gradient & properly juggle multiple strategies... say, doing frequent incremental backups to a connected drive when the computer is genuinely inactive (say, screensaver active), replicating those local backups to a networked drive on the local LAN when the internal-to-internal backups are finished & the computer is still inactive, and periodically backing up a subset of files from the networked lan backup to "the cloud" (the ones that are important enough to pay ongoing fees to safeguard... I might have ~10-12 terabytes of files, but only a few hundred gigabytes of them are really what I'd be devastated to lose, and only a few gigabytes of them are truly what I'd call irreplaceable... and at least a quarter of THOSE are sitting on remote git repositories somewhere, anyway). Put another way, indiscriminately and continuously keeping 10+ terabytes of files backed up in "the cloud" just isn't sane (in terms of cost OR ongoing performance), but keeping a subset of them appropriately backed up is a major pain.
What I'd LOVE to see from Microsoft (and what would convince me to switch to Linux once and for all, if it appeared there first) -- a new kind of filesystem I'll call "DHFS" ("data-hoarders' file system"). In day to day use, it would work like ext4 or NTFS... files get written directly to the drive, for performance. However, in the background (as a lowest-priority system task), it goes through periodically, finds all the "real" files, moves the "real" file to some "master" volume (assuming there isn't already an authoritative, identical copy of that exact file already there), and replaces it with a DHFSymlink (which works like a "regular" symlink for reading purposes, but writes/updates result in the symlink getting blown away & replaced by the new data (or if it's an append, some special structure that says, "the start of this file is (some file pointed to by this link), but the subsequent data is (this)", since creating an entire new copy of the file just to add a byte to it would totally kill performance).
With something like DHFS, only the authoritative master copies of the files, and their MUCH smaller symlink data, gets backed up.
In effect, DHFS would systematically preserve directly-usable copies of every unique file on the system (assuming you could figure out the "real" name and location of any given file), while preserving the CONTEXT & Metadata of those files with something similar to symlinks. If the ability to roll back state wasn't required, it would also do something akin to mark & sweep garbage collection... it would periodically go through its ar
One of the theories floating out there is that it has something to do with being domain joined. Another theory is that it has something to do with OneDrive. The only resolution I've seen on forums is to run undelete software, otherwise the recourse is restore from last backup.
So the entire system is needlessly complex, otherwise these three things (local files, domains, a cloud service) wouldn't be tied together in such a way.
On my Linux systems I'd have to REALLY go out of my way to entangle those three things to that degree. And I still wouldn't have files going *poof* for mysterious reasons that can't be tracked down. Certainly nothing as trivial as a system update would cause something like this. This isn't something where you can say "ah well I see how a mistake could have done this". It's mind-blowing. What is the Windows updater doing that even allows this to be possible?
On Linux here's what a system update entails: unpack some archives, copy their files to the right places, update the package manager's DB. Maybe generate a new bootloader configuration, which happens automatically and is only necessary if there was a kernel update. The whole process can be put into the background and ignored while you continue using the machine like normal.
Apparently this process is FAR more complicated on Windows systems. That's remarkable considering the scope of Windows updates is far smaller (core system only) compared to what Linux package managers are updating. Amazing. Is the design of Windows really this broken?