
Windows 10’s latest update is deleting some users’ documents - RobertSmith
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/5/17940902/microsoft-windows-10-october-2018-update-deleting-documents-issues
======
Too
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.

~~~
ragequitta
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.

~~~
fhood
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.

~~~
conradfr
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.

~~~
ragequitta
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.

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

------
AdmiralAsshat
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...

~~~
Tajnymag
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.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
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.

~~~
Zhyl
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.

~~~
therein
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.

------
AnIdiotOnTheNet
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.

~~~
supernovae
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.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> 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.

------
sebazzz
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.

~~~
cm2187
Do you mean that microsoft is forcing onedrive on its users as part of the
update?

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

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

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

------
paulpauper
windows 7..the last good Windows OS.

~~~
ashleyn
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.

~~~
benjaminjackman
> 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.

~~~
jamesgeck0
> 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.

~~~
benjaminjackman
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.

------
supernovae
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.

------
StreamBright
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.

~~~
sjellis
> 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/](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.

------
severino
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.

------
bitL
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.

------
uxcolumbo
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.

------
herf
Look here to disable the setting with gpedit.msc (mine was off):
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9lkera/how_to_fix...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9lkera/how_to_fix_windows_10_1809_profile_deletion/)

------
eltoozero
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](https://photos.app.goo.gl/WLwfpg8PAzTfihSb9)

------
kgwxd
I hope it has something to do with DRM enforcement.

~~~
castis
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.

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

