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                      -- AskWoody on Win10 1809 upgrade

"I’ve been covering reams of bugs in 1809 on AskWoody, but the worst problem is with deleted data files. As I explained on Thursday, many people report that the upgrade to 1809 wipes out all files in the \Documents, \Pictures, \Music, and \Videos folders. The folders are still there, but nothing’s in them.

Combine that with Microsoft’s self-granted permission to install the Win10 1809 upgrade on any computer that “Checks” for updates and you have a potent recipe for disaster. Nobody knows how many hapless Win10 users clicked “Check for Updates” and discovered that all of their Documents and Pictures were blown away.

There’s a way to recover the deleted files, most of the time, using Recuva. But Recuva doesn’t work all of the time (it has difficulties with solid state drives), even in the best of situations. This isn’t the best of situations.

If you were eager to believe the breathless reviews about a product that’s marginally better than what you have already – and you trusted Microsoft enough to install it on your machine as quickly as you could – consider it a lesson learned.
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This time the problem is particularly dire, because it's unclear how Microsoft is going to restore data it deleted."

"Making this worse is that the bug does appear to have been reported. Numerous reports in Feedback Hub, Microsoft's bug-reporting tool for Windows 10, complain of data deletion after installing preview releases. None of the bug reports appears to have many upvotes, and the reports generally lack in detail. So just as with the more recent reports, they make it hard to pin down the root cause. But it's obvious that, at the very least, something was going wrong and that it was important enough that it should have been investigated and addressed.

Compounding this issue is that Microsoft's rollout of version 1809 was already unusual. For reasons unknown, Microsoft didn't release this update to the Release Preview ring, so the most realistic installation scenario—someone going from version 1803 to 1809—didn't receive much testing anyway. And all this is against the longer-term concern that Microsoft laid off many dedicated testers without really replacing the testing that those testers were doing."