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Comment by rejectfinite | Hacker News Reader

>I was frankly astonished that Windows would drop them into a temporary user profile without dire warnings about its transience.

There is warnings... Now the Win7 one is just the notification baloon and easy to miss but the 10 one is pretty "in your face"

Windows 7: https://imgur.com/a/ao5AtO6

Windows 10: https://imgur.com/a/Hl9XnZV

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Too long and too verbose and too ordinary for such an critical warning. The title "You have been logged on with a temporary profile." is so unoffencive that doesn't really make you read the paragraph explaining what it means. It sounds like something that you can deal with later, it should be "All files will be deleted upon sign out" and then you can read and learn that this is a temporary profile.

Windows likes to tell stuff of no urgency all the time and people will close those click. click. click.

IMHO when the computer is used in extraordinary situation the UI should be making it very clear. Probably all kind of customisation should be removed so the user feel like in wrong place and has high alertness. When moving files into folders that will be deleted the user should be warned with a short and scary message(macOS warns you that the files will be deleted from the cloud if you move files out of iCloud synced folders like Desktop and Documents).

guess what? all customization is removed, because that configuration is stored in the user profile.

Good point but just in case if the user has not been using a customised UI, maybe everything should look non-default and out of place. If I remember correctly, the system defaults to a low resolution when something goes wrong and this may help.

The point is, the user should be made aware that this is not business as usual and proceed with extreme caution. A popup with cryptic title and long paragraph won't do it.

On some Linux distros logging in with the root account gives you a lot of red in the ui. Same as the terminal colours when you sudo su.

Since Windows is giving you a temporary profile that doesn't have any of your settings, why not put a warning on the wallpaper, make the directories read only, the ui red/yellow, or add a logoff script that checks pictures, videos and docs directories etc? Back in my windows days I did a ton of user profile configuration for roaming profiles, default profiles etc. This stuff isn't hard. You'd expect Microsoft to do a better job at it when there's a risk of data loss

It is absurd that a user profile, even one that's intended to be ephemeral, is _ever_ placed in temporary storage for exactly the reason of what happened here. The data should have been retained, at least for some preset amount of time (on the order of months) if not indefinitely.

The old profile is still under C:\Users

No old data is deleted. In OPs case the user moved the data over to the temp one and then it gets deleted on relog.

For a home user the fix is hopefully to just reboot

For a domain users I have to do this when it happens: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/48012-fix-youve-been-sig...

Perhaps a lot of key folders such as Documents, pictures, etc should also be readonly or denied access to prevent someone from using those temp profile folders and beliving data would persist.

Or maybe a temp profiles directory structure shouldn't be visually similar or identical to a full a profile.

Lots of low hanging fruit here.

Sounds like good ideas for sure.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/send-feedback-to...

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