> I was frankly astonished that Windows would drop them into a temporary user profile without dire warnings about its transience
Does it? I recall using Windows 7 and being dropped into ~TEMP sometimes, but I was warned with a notification.
Does it? I recall using Windows 7 and being dropped into ~TEMP sometimes, but I was warned with a notification.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/my-pro...
A notification in the status bar, along with their other 10+ notifications about Skype, printers, antivirus etc. They didn't see it, or if they did see it, didn't understand the implications. The horrible thing is that they didn't want to bother me with it, and tried to solve the issue themselves :(
I also doubt the typical user will know that profile is shorthand for user profile and know what that is.
End result: because of corruption of some data the user likely is only remotely interested in, all data they were interested in got deleted.
https://www.windowsphoneinfo.com/attachments/97fdf7d3-6fca-4...
The trick here is how do we solve this other than further user education? When the user profile folder is unusable for some reason you either have to do this or just refuse login. Neither are good answers, but this one is better as long as you understand what the system's doing.
If one doesn't know what the system's doing and isn't interested in trying to understand it I don't see a way to avoid this issue.
As this whole discussion shows, no, this one is worse since it can easily lead to data loss. A third option, however, would be to do this but not erase the profile on logout.
That is apparently false because the user did access their files and dragged them into the temp profile.
Either that should be literally true (a completely broken profile is a bad problem that needs help from a competent tech support person) or the profile should at least be made read-only until the entire profile is deleted. That way they could copy the files into the temp folder, but not lose anything (other than changes) after logging out.
Also, the warning should be more obviously "fatal", not something to be clicked through. E.g. replace the desktop background with a black screen and put the warning text in red on it.
Hell, even just changing the terrible wording on the notification (and putting it somewhere much less ignorable) would be a step forward. E.g. "Your files have been temporarily moved to X. Any files you place in My Documents, My Pictures (etc) will be deleted when you log off or turn off your computer.").
Or the move opration immediately prompted for admin authorisation, and they just clicked through that? (not suggesting that these prompts are in any way useful for the average user)