Comment by cmroanirgo
7 years ago
I would dispute this fact.
Just yesterday I saw that my brother's Win10 desktop was magically empty after he'd rebooted due to windows update. After hunting around for solutions, (none of which worked), I noticed that all the missing desktop files were magically in the recycle bin.
Nice work M$.
From memory, the update was #1803, so not sure if this is relevant to the arctechnica article... but since it was yesterday, it's clearly not 100% accurate.
(PS: No, my brother didn't cause them to be put there)
The update in question here is #1809; so it's possible your brother encountered another data loss bug, which, considering their current state of QA, doesn't seem that unlikely.
By default the recycle bin has a limit of how much files it can store, and if you try to put more in there it will be deleted. It'll ask when you do the operation, but it if was done automatically as part of the update, who knows. A safety net with such big holes never made sense to me so that's why I always change the limit to 100% of the disk size. Your brother was lucky to recover his files.
I wonder if Microsoft is able to cancel the installation of already downloaded updates - if not, something like this might happen if the erroneous update was already downloaded in the background earlier. I think the default setting is that updates will be downloaded automatically and then installed later whenever the system decides there is a suitable period of "inactive time".
The update that deleted files wasn't ever an automatic one. You would have had to manually update. Fingers crossed they didn't mess up another. Seems unlikely.
Imagine the response if it was a forced automatic update...
...and this is why I never trust automatic updates. Hard to tell what caused something if the system is silently changing under you.