Back up Windows 10 Before Installing the October Update, Otherwise You Risk Losing Your Files
We’re all together racking our brains over how the Windows 10 October Update was able to bypass Microsoft’s QA teams. According to numerous reports, something in the update may delete the contents of your Windows 10 custom folders – you know, your documents, photos, music, videos, etc.
As one Reddit user describes:
“As I mentioned in another post, the update erased% userprofile% \ documents and \ pictures that were not used as default folders (that is, as part of the My Documents, My Pictures libraries). My default folders were and still are in OneDrive and have not been touched by the update. Only the folders in% userprofile% were removed, although they were not empty.
There are wild speculations ahead: maybe the error is not that the installer mistakenly deletes data, but that it does not transfer certain folders, thinking that they are no longer used? I am not familiar with the internals of the update process, but I can imagine that the installer first copies the old stuff to “Windows.old”, then removes the old installation (thus removing all files), performs a clean installation of the OS. and finally restores user data from “Windows.old”. This explains why I cannot find my files in “Windows.old” – because some unknown condition was met, the installer did not copy them in the first place and thus could not restore anything later. “
Another writes:
“I lost my D: \ Document folder. It is not configured as a document library and is not even on the system drive! I don’t have a backup for this because I believe that a system update should never touch a non-system drive. “
Regardless of why these deletions are happening – and Microsoft is ” actively investigating ” the issue – here’s how you can avoid this big Windows mess.
Back up your system before major updates
I’m lazy. When a big system update comes in, I’m always eager to click on the Check for Updates link and let all these nice new features and fixes flow to my desktop from Redmond (or elsewhere). The Windows 10 October Update is a great reminder for me and everyone to back up our systems before installing any major updates.
If you can make a complete clone of your primary hard drive, great! You can revert to the previous version of the OS if something goes wrong with the update. Otherwise, you should at least regularly back up your important files.
Programs and applications can be reinstalled, but any of the main folders in C: \ Users \ [your name], such as Documents, Pictures, Videos, Desktop, etc., must also be in another location. Maybe in two other places. Remind me to copy them to the cloud storage every week. Regularly create backups using an application like Backblaze . Create a duplicate archive of your huge photo gallery on an external drive or network storage device. Regardless of how you do it, there is no reason why files that you cannot imagine should be stored in only one location. No no no.
How to recover files deleted by Windows 10
If you’ve just installed the Windows 10 October Update and found that it destroyed some (or all) of your important user folders – and you haven’t backed them up anywhere else – stop what you are doing right now. Don’t do anything else. Download the free version of Recuva . Install it, run a scan on your Windows drive, and you might be able to save your data. No promises, but this is the best option you have right now.
You might also be in luck if you’ve previously enabled Windows’ built-in file history tool that lets you restore old copies of files and folders. You can turn on file history in Settings > Update & Security > Backup . To restore a folder where File History was previously saved, navigate to its parent folder in Explorer, right-click it, select Properties, and click the Previous Versions tab.