Windows 10’s latest update is deleting some users’ documents | Hacker News Reader

Windows 10’s latest update is deleting some users’ documents

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85 pointsRobertSmith72 comments

Microsoft has really gone too far with OTA and automatically reverting settings to more grandma friendly options. I have a windows pc which every month will have some setting reverted without me touching it. It can be anything and it usually takes some time to discover it because it only presents itself when you perform some rare task. My network sharing settings and external monitor scaling settings has been lost multiple times after OTA.

I used to prefer windows but now it's simply not reliable as a OS anymore. They treat it as the front page of Facebook. Every time you boot up its a surprise what you are going to get. Backwards compatability which used to be Microsoft hallmark has now sunk so low that even the user facing options and data are unstable.

I understand the need and desire for OTA and shipping new and modified features but whatever you do don't break user settings unless the feature is so much modified the old setting doesn't make sense anymore.

>They treat it as the front page of Facebook.

yes, well said. I find this especially annoying. They also nag me to install or try something, and the only thing that the nag messages are achieving is making me start to hate windows....

Yep. It's the built in "try office" notifications that keep turning themselves back on that make me crazy. Windows is a paid product, and has ads built in. Linux is free, no ads. Why do I put up with it...

Visual studio and games. Windows as an OS just pisses me off, but every time I try to make Linux my primary OS, I realize how attached I am to things on the windows platform.

>Visual studio and games

Unless you're maintaining old .NET Framework apps, VS Code and/or CLion should cover all your needs when it comes to graphical IDEs. As far as games go, between native, Steam Proton and Lutris I've found no end to the amount of great games to play. Yesterday I started playing Overcooked 2 (native) with my wife, right after we finished the first one (regular Wine). I also play Overwatch (with Lutris) at least a couple of times a week which plays pretty great nowadays if I tone down the settings a bit, and been playing Doom 2016 (Steam Proton) which runs every bit as well as it does on Windows.

Yep. Microsoft's playground has always been our computers and servers.

They forgot to turn the flag down while it is exiting Microsoft Ring.

I know I'm going to sound like a microsoft employee or apologist, but I really have no skin in the game. I want windows to be better, but I think people are just going to far with minor gripes. Windows 10 has been the least disruptive Windows OS I've ever used. Maybe it's because I don't need to mess around with many settings, but I have had exactly 0 problems. On a clean install I used O&O Shutup 10, change my mouse settings, delete the 6-10 icons in the start menu that I don't want, and I've pretty much been good since beta (using O&O and making sure my drivers are good after every major update). I think the biggest disruption I remember was when they changed the audio settings completely, but that change was necessary (windows audio settings sucked) and is actually a pretty good change.

And I think people are not remembering just how many problems there were with windows 7/XP. Like the EXACT same problems people are complaining about now. Name a problem you're experiencing I can find a forum thread about someone having it on almost any version of Windows OS. And quite often many distros of linux as well.

Windows 7 and XP were not good, people see XP through nostalgia goggles and Windows 7 is just prettier XP. Windows 10 is easily my favorite of the three.

I wish I understood windows better though. The issues I run into with unix machines always seem more fixable, because I find the solutions and approaches more intuitive. Windows remains a black box to me.

> Windows 7 is just prettier XP

Windows 7 has a completely revamped driver model and network stack compared to XP. They aren't really that alike.

Sorry, I meant that they looked and felt quite similar to the user.

I agree that sometimes Windows can be puzzling. Though I think most of the 'black box' problems I've encountered in windows have been my own damn fault. I notice people try and "fine tune" it too much. I used to be this way too, because it used to be necessary. It's really not anymore IMO. Yes you want to turn off some things (O&O makes a good list, and backs everything up before changing stuff, which is why I use it) but 99.9999% of users don't have any reason to go into the registry for instance.

And if you really care about the 3MB and 0 resources you're saving by tweaking the features/apps/etc installed be VERY careful. Do not trust random 'security' and 'debloat' scripts to not completely mess up your OS. Even if you understand the script, you may not understand that uninstalling X causes Y problem. I really do think win10 is hated on quite a bit because people have caused their own issues thinking they know more than they do.

How are they "not good"?

You can still find XP machines in a lot of places, a 17 years old OS.

And what's bad about Windows 7? My 2011 laptop is still running the original Windows 7 installation without any problems and I don't even remember the last time my Windows 7 desktop has crashed or caused me any trouble. Except when Windows Update decides to reboot by itself ...

Mostly my only gripe is that Docker on Windows 7 is legacy.

XP was a very hot mess back in the day. It grew to be a passable OS, but if you were around IT when it was new you know what a nightmare it was. I still have nightmares about taking calls about the blaster worm. The problems people have with windows 10 aren't even close in scope to the ones we had with XP.

That's true. IIRC XP wasn't really good until sometime after SP2 (which caused its own headaches).

You can still find Windows 3.11 in some places. Longevity is not necessarily linked to quality

> Windows 10 has been the least disruptive Windows OS I've ever used.

As someone who used to like Windows, you must be living in some alternate reality. I can't tall you the number of things that routinely break in Win10 and then cannot be fixed without an in-place upgrade. Do a search for "Windows 10 start menu doesn't work". That one has happened to me a number of times and none of the "helpful" suggestions from MS ever work except reinstalling the entire OS.

Have you had this problem on your computer before installing any other software? The problem with most common windows issues is they have absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft. When you have millions of compatible software packages that people install willy nilly, 'debloat' and 'super security' scripts that people seem to think are necessary to save 0 MB of RAM and 3 MB of hard drive space, and just a general population of people who like to 'HARDCORE TWEAK' their OS it's impossible to not run into millions of issues.

As for the problem you've been experiencing maybe this will work?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/7olecs/start_men...

Last time I ran into this problem it was immediately after an in-place upgrade from the Media Creation Utility, because the feature update failed and this was my only recourse. As I expected, nothing helped and I had to do a clean install.

I'm not a hardcore Windows tweaker, most of the applications I use at work are either portable[0], or made by Microsoft.

I don't believe I've tried the method outlined in that post, I'll keep it in mind for the inevitable next time that this occurs. Though it does force one to wonder WTF is wrong with Microsoft that they keep suggesting steps that don't work and then reinstallation, while some random internet has to provide the actual solution in the comments[1]. That seems to happen way too often.

[0] Because it's the right way to distribute and manage applications. Case in point: all I had to do was point a toolbar at my Portable Apps folder and as far as my workflow was concerned it was like nothing had ever happened.

[1] Somebody aught to start a charity that seeks out these heroes and buys them beer on behalf of all the people they've saved from pulling their hair out.

Well, you see, when you fire a whole lot of your OS group's QA department [1] [2] [3] ...

[1] - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140806183208-12100070-why-d...

[2] - https://www.computerworld.com/article/2878026/microsoft-to-b...

[3] - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-m...

In the spirit of "I bet I can find your problem in any windows OS"

Windows 7: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2008331/windows-start...

Windows XP: http://www.instant-registry-fixes.org/fix-windows-xp-start-m...

It's not about the problem ever happening, it's about how often it does.

> minor gripes.

This last update deleted people's data. Permanently.

I have a windows 10 machine (for games), I installed it myself so it's got no pre-loaded shit, and yet it still bothers me about stuff. Onedrive, cortana, etc. etc. The UI is shitty like someone in MS has gone ERMAHGERD TERBLERTS and dumped a load of swipy touch screen UI into it, UI that is just frustrating on a normal regular computer.

Also, I shouldn't have to fix the OS right after install. As far as I remember the only customisation I did to my mac was to switch back to the non-wierd scrolling direction. Maybe that and turning on dock hiding.

Do you know how many updates have deleted some people's data permanently? It was one of the top call drivers almost every update back in windows XP days. There's a good reason that backup ALL important files is a mantra among people who know what they're doing. No matter the OS, no matter the hardware, stuff WILL get deleted.

The UI is fine. Don't use onedrive or cortana, turned them off with one click and they've been off now for years. Not sure how 1 click every few years is a problem. And no idea what you mean about the swipey stuff (I use a mouse? I only click things? idk) but yes tablets are very popular these days and microsoft does have to accommodate them. Of course?

And what do you mean by fix the OS? I use O&O because I like what it does, but when I use a Win10 computer at work or at school it's not a big deal that it's not done. I don't feel like I'm working on a 'broken' OS out of the box. And if you're ever upset about Candy Crush advertisements on Win10..... try installing ANY app on MacOS (which heavily relies on the app store unlike win10) and see how many advertisements you run into before you're done.

Yes everything you've mentioned does seem like a rather minor gripe. Like some of them (onedrive and cortana) literally 1 click gripes.

Not OP but:

The "Try OneDrive!" And XBox Live shortcuts (and others maybe) in my start menu cannot be removed without using the command line.

Deleting users data after an update which they have no choice but to install (and not even a choice of when to install it) is, in fact, different than losing data after a user chooses to install an update. Shrugging and saying "they should've had a backup" is the epitome of entitled.

The only version of Windows 10 that performs correctly for a power user is the LTSB. Which is only officially available for large companies. You can actually control what the OS does, and when it does it (same as every other professional windows OS that I used).

And saying that having advertisements in the start menu out of the box isn't bad because a competitor has ads during installation... I don't know what to say. I guess, I thought I was allowed to want my OS to get better over time? Compared to previous versions, as well as competitors. There was quite a fuss about Xiaomi having ads in the settings app, pretty similar.

> Do you know how many updates have deleted some people's data permanently?

One more than should have happened?

> It was one of the top call drivers almost every update back in windows XP days.

So you're saying that Microsoft had form for this and let another one through? That's pretty bad.

> There's a good reason that backup ALL important files is a mantra among people who know what they're doing.

Sure, I have at least two backups of my machine using different technologies and to different locations (and yet somehow OS X, or linux for that matter, has never actually deleted my files), I'm a techie, but most people don't because most people don't know what they're doing, and puffing out your chest and claiming technical superiority isn't going to help those people. As someone else pointed out, it's entitled.

> No matter the OS, no matter the hardware, stuff WILL get deleted.

Apparently if you use Windows it will.

> The UI

The UI is not fine, it's crap. It's been infected with tablety nonesense, and as I use a Mouse too it jars.

> tablets are very popular these days and microsoft does have to accommodate them. Of course?

That doesn't mean bits of my desktop OS needs to look like a tablet.

> And if you're ever upset about Candy Crush advertisements on Win10..... try installing ANY app on MacOS (which heavily relies on the app store unlike win10) and see how many advertisements you run into before you're done.

Of course there's some adverts in the App store, it's a store, and I expect to see them the couple of times a year I actually use it.

But day to day, when I turn on or log in to my machine, it's just that, my machine. Not someone elses machine that is a funnel for adverts.

Side note, thanks for mentioning O&O ShutUp 10 [1] this is the first time I've heard of it and it seems pretty great. You can turn off many of the telemetry and auto update 'features' and it even remembers what settings you chose and can re-apply them after an update that resets them. Honestly I'm ok with auto updates for the most part, but I'm trying to improve my privacy on devices that I use.

> O&O ShutUp10 is entirely free and does not have to be installed – it can be simply run directly and immediately on your PC. And it will not install or download retrospectively unwanted or unnecessary software

[1]: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

> They treat it as the front page of Facebook.

For me, the last several years my designated Windows machine is just a firmware for running single-player triple-A games in the weekends, and always offline.

Android used to do exactly the same modifying my settings during upgrades. I cant believe we are living in an era when software vendors just fuck with users left and right.

This is particularly scary when combined with Windows' propensity to commandeer everything you plug into it.

My only W10 machine is an HTPC in my living room, into which I've plugged a 4TB external hard-drive. That box has no other purpose than to run Kodi and serve up my media, so the primary drive inside the PC itself is mostly free and has plenty of hard-drive space.

Nonetheless, I periodically open the external itself in the file explorer to sync its contents with my backup drives, and discover that Windows decided to use my external drive to store logs, update files, and other garbage. It seems to have no concept of the idea that an external drive is for my storage, not Microsoft's storage.

That lack of separation between the OS update process and userland worries me that the same bug which wipes out user directories could extend to the external, as well.

I'd just as soon unplug it before letting Windows 10 update, but then there's that nasty habit of updating automatically without warning me...

If so, have you considered for example the LibreElec distribution?

If you don't need anything other than Kodi and an occasional file management, you'd be good.

I should have mentioned that it's also occasionally a casual gaming machine. The emulators are all through RetroArch these days, so that migration would be seamless. It's the Steam games that would be the sticking point. I know I could probably get most of them running under WINE, but it's the guaranteed compatibility of a 20-year gaming library that makes it difficult to fully close the door on Windows.

Have you tried the new Steam Play (Proton)? In short, steam will now automatically wrap all windows games up with Wine and DXVK. Many many games are now working out of the box without any faff.

Yeah, it is actually pretty impressive how well it works and how performant it is. What is upsetting me is that the unsupported games are not unsupported because of the game itself but because of the anti-cheat systems they use not supporting Linux.

To be fair, I also have no concept of an external drive being for my storage and not OS usage. Storage is storage, especially if it’s always plugged in.

As a vocal critic of the Linux Desktop, even I feel that soon Microsoft will have succeeded in making Windows so horrifically awful and user-hostile that the Linux Desktop will start to look good by comparison. I mean, if I'm going to put up with rapid update cycles that break things for no reason, decade old bugs going unfixed while features are added that no one asked for, inconsistent and redundant interfaces, developers who ignore user feedback and fetishize complexity, and fragile systems designed by Rube Goldberg, I may as well be using a Linux Desktop. About the only things holding me back any more are my unmitigated hatred for package managers as an application distribution model and crappy graphics drivers, otherwise Windows has achieved rough parity on bad system design.

For now, I'm staying sane on Win 10 by completely disabling all update functionality. I suspect that something will eventually make that untenable though. I've suspected for some time that it has been Microsoft's goal to kill off desktop computing, and they seem to be succeeding handily.

Software is software, even Linux updates break things. Nothing is perfect. Let's be honest though, as an avid windows user i'm thrilled with all these quarterly updates, fixes, new features and functionality add. It sucked when service packs were years apart and nothing changed and you needed new OS's to use new functionality.

Now with a free update we have the linux subsystem, have docker support, Hyper-V updates, improved notification center, dark mode, improved store with books, edge PDF/epub reading is absolutely amazing (and it works with remote syn /page read updates on ios & android!), PowerShell improvements, timeline support across devices and if you use android you get SMS integration, image backup/sync and shortly remote android display on your desktop and many fixes/improvements/refinements

It's never been a better experience to be a windows user..

Everyone updates their iPhone and Android - and deals with the inevitable quirks of that upgrade and they move on.

But with windows...

I believe most of the people experiencing missing docs enabled storage sense integration where if you're low on disk space it moves your docs to onedrive - it prompts you to enable this... others are people with non standard configs that probably break in every update anyway and you're told not to do.

> Software is software, even Linux updates break things. Nothing is perfect.

I don't believe I said otherwise.

> Let's be honest though, as an avid windows user i'm thrilled with all these quarterly updates, fixes, new features and functionality add. It sucked when service packs were years apart and nothing changed and you needed new OS's to use new functionality.

Great for you I guess. Like many people who have to do a job with computers though, I prefer to have things stable and known and consistent for long periods of time. Windows used to be really good at this, and now it is really, really, crap at it.

> Now with a free update we have the linux subsystem, have docker support, Hyper-V updates, improved notification center, dark mode, improved store with books, edge PDF/epub reading is absolutely amazing (and it works with remote syn /page read updates on ios & android!), PowerShell improvements, timeline support across devices and if you use android you get SMS integration, image backup/sync and shortly remote android display on your desktop and many fixes/improvements/refinements

Only about two of these things aren't just new versions of applications that could have been completely separate from the OS. Dark Mode is an especially telling thing to be excited about, you used to just be able to change your theme to any colors you wanted and it'd work for everything that used Win32 widgets, but then everyone started building their native GUIs on web-like garbage heaps, including Microsoft, so now everything is inconsistent and awful and it takes an OS update to change some colors. This is not progress.

> It's never been a better experience to be a windows user..

I could not possibly disagree more. And I feel like your disagreement comes from inexperience with past versions of Windows.

It appears this has something to do with folder redirection and doing folder redirection to OneDrive. One of the workarounds might be to install the new OneDrive manually before updating.

Do you mean that microsoft is forcing onedrive on its users as part of the update?

sadly onedrive has always been forced on users with windows 10.

How so? I have access several windows 10 machines and don't even use a Microsoft account on them.

I don't use a Windows account but it's still sitting there in the notification area.

windows 7..the last good Windows OS.

s/last/only

Although I have a sweet spot for the windows xp x64 edition, it worked pretty good in the end too.

After trying to deal with windows 10 I went 100% linux and started gaming on PS4 instead of my PC.

same, consoles for games, linux for everything else

Compared to Linux the amount of bloat shipping with Windows 10 is simply unreal. Open up Task Manager on a fresh install and the only two questions I can ask are "What the fuck do half of these services actually do?" and "Why is Windows Defender ALWAYS running up the CPU?"

The start menu is loaded with trash like Candy Crush, which I can only guess is a revenue stream at the expense of user experience. You can't rid yourself of OneDrive, Cortana, or the mountain of other trash professionals and power users don't care for. If you try to, you'll rudely find that the GPOs to do so were removed, even from Professional.

The only way out of all the bloat and social media noise is to buy Enterprise, and I don't even think those are for sale to consumers or available in units of one.

I'll stick with being forced to use it for games only.

The thing is, Windows 10 is starting to look more and more like a Linux distribution. Half-assed and inconsistent UI, broken updates, etc.

I'm fine with this in Linux, because it's built by people who donate their time for free, and might not be experts in UX, etc. But seeing the same in a commercial OS that Microsoft wants you to pay for is unacceptable.

Have you seen elementary OS? Very clearly macOS inspired and they've done a great job with it. Worth a look for anyone who hates half-assed and inconsistent UIs.

I'm not a regular user (just toyed with it in some VMs) so I can't vouch for how the updates do, but I was impressed with the overall level of polish. It's an Ubuntu-derivative based on LTS releases so it lags a ways behind the cutting edge.

EDIT: looks like elementary OS 5.0 "Juno" is in beta and should be out soon. This release is based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Elementary is good in terms of looks on the face, but starts to break down as soon as you dig deeper. Inconsistent updates and strange issues requiring manual intervention via the terminal are still there.

I do remember some UI inconsistency showing up as soon as you want any software that wasn't written specifically for elementary (like VS Code), but that's inevitable since it's basically rolling its own UI no matter what OS you're on.

Not recalling much repeated terminal intervention, though there were a few safety nets that I immediately turned off the moment I had it installed (I think related to package manager installations?)

Dropbox did not work well.

Linux Mint has been nothing but solid and consistent since I started to use it.

> The thing is, Windows 10 is starting to look more and more like a Linux distribution. Half-assed and inconsistent UI, broken updates, etc.

Desktop engineering is hard (as Microsoft are demonstrating). There are a very small number of really good desktop distributions (Fedora, Solus, Ubuntu Mate, may be a couple of others), which are not inconsistent or half-assed, but the side-effect of Free Software is that any motivated developer can have a go and put out their own distribution.

> I'll stick with being forced to use it for games only.

Steam just got an upgrade that automagically runs a lot of games via a modified version of wine (called proton) sometimes even with better performance than on Windows. It's worked very well for everything I have tried it with so far. So that just leaves games not available in Steam. The biggest of which has to be Blizzard, however a lot of their games already worked decently well with Wine, so hopefully proton works with them as well.

As of today most games may actually already run better on Linux than on Windows.

Proton is open source, isn't it? I'm sure you can convince it to run a Blizzard game. Not sure about the results though. D3D9 WoW works very, very well under wine-d3d9[0], but D3D9 support was dropped from WoW a long time ago.

Can't say anything about the rest of Blizzard games.

[0] https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/app-emulation/wine-d3d9

As I mentioned on somewhere else on this thread, the problem with Blizzard games and other multiplayer games you may want to play on Linux under Proton/Wine/whatever will fail to join the actual online games because anti-cheat like Battleye don't support Linux because Battleye on Windows loads a kernel module.

> As of today most games may actually already run better on Linux than on Windows.

I think that may be overselling it quite a bit. Every time I've checked to see how a game I'm currently playing would run, there are always caveats. Like random crashes in Rise of the Tomb Raider and Monster Hunter World.

It hasn’t been my experience most of the games I’ve tried have worked pretty flawlessly but I also don’t play a lot of AAA games.

I've tried running Grim Dawn and Rise of Nations after every steam update (I opted into Steam Play's proton beta and get reasonably frequent steam client updates now) and no luck so far.

I've migrated my daily driver to linux, a large amount of gaming to linux and/or consoles, and am down to a handful of games that only run on Windows. If that gap closes then I can get by with Windows in VMs only.

> Compared to Linux the amount of bloat shipping with Windows 10 is simply unreal. Open up Task Manager on a fresh install and the only two questions I can ask are "What the fuck do half of these services actually do?"

I invite you to list the processes running on a fresh install of a modern Linux Desktop distribution for comparison. There's plenty of bloat to go around.

It isn't too bad. You got your oomkiller, maybe a kworker.

I use windows on many systems and have no such problems. What was introduced into the latest update is what is added into storage sense - if you enable storage sense integration into OneDrive then when you are low on disk space, documents are MOVED to one drive (offline). You DO have to opt into this.

Other people who have this problem with missing docs apparently have done registry hacks and sub mounted volumes to fake onedrive access to USB devices or to move things around in ways that were never supported - OneDrive has always attempted to block/disable such hacks but people are creative... i have 0 sympathies for those users - but again - their docs are probably still on the umounted volume they could re-mount (assign a drive letter) or they're fully migrated to OneDrive.

I still does not understand why can't we separate out operating system from user content. It would be pretty simply just have OS snapshots that you can boot up and switch between them while having /home unchanged.

> I still does not understand why can't we separate out operating system from user content. It would be pretty simply just have OS snapshots that you can boot up and switch between them while having /home unchanged.

You can: https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/

Some of the Silverblue developers at Red Hat have been using it as their working environment for a while, but there's still quite a few rough edges left. Once the key applications work 100% on Flatpak, it will probably be viable for a wider audience.

I always find myself unable to delete any file on my computer, no matter I never needed it for years, nor I won't need it again in the forseeable future. New features like this one from Microsoft can definitely help.

Even the very first Windows 10 version was deleting files on hard drive, if they were false positives of Windows Defender. I remember fighting it for a few hours once when I needed to run some (safe) utility (I compiled), but which was disappearing within seconds after Windows Defender ran scan on it. IIRC it was very difficult to find settings where you could completely disable Windows Defender.

I use both OSX and Windows.

Never experienced problems with W10 updates. Yes, eventual forced restarts are annoying - but I can see both sides, i.e. making sure users have latest security updates installed.

> They treat it as the front page of Facebook.

I never use the Windows start menu. I use:

- Total Commander

- WIN+Q

- WIN+X

And I also don't use a Microsoft account - when you install it just use a local account instead, just like you did when you installed older versions of Windows.

Look here to disable the setting with gpedit.msc (mine was off): https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9lkera/how_to_fix...

Windows update used to have a screen that said: “All of your files are exactly where you left them.”

I never trusted it.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/WLwfpg8PAzTfihSb9

I hope it has something to do with DRM enforcement.

If DRM ever gets to the point where it starts arbitrarily deleting data from my hard drive that will be the last time I ever touch software written by anyone involved.

Why wait until it happens? In fact, it's already happened on Kindle.

What do you mean? Deleting pirate user's data? That is definitely computer abuse.

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