Microsoft’s rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update has arguably been one of its most troublesome releases in recent times. While previous updates have also had issues, this one boasted particularly serious ones such as user files being deleted, bugs in the Task Manager, Intel driver incompatibility, internet connectivity issues, and more.
Following widespread reporting of these issues, Microsoft has now pulled the Windows 10 October 2018 Update from circulation.
I’ve seen a lot of reports of disappearing files, so Microsoft didn’t have much of a choice here. My own two machines experienced no issues with the update.
Why did they skip the release preview? If MS wants to insist on forcing a large update down customers’ throats every 6 months, they need to start QA’ing their shit.
It’s worse than that. I just watched a Youtube video [1] where a guy showed a screenshot of Microsoft’s own Feedback Hub showing that the file deletion problem had already been reported before the public release.
Microsoft ignored it or something.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUQRIsHBvYU
zlynx,
In the winduws update bug escalation I was privy to with a corporate client, microsoft was not only made aware of the situation, their investigation concluded it was intentional and would not be fixed. In my client’s case the data that windows update was removing was in the User\AppData\Local folder. I’ve always had great support from microsoft in the past. I have no idea what’s going on inside microsoft right now, but it’s clear to me that their support staff were aware of the issues and got overridden for some reason.
I’d love to hear a first-hand explanation from whomever concluded that deleting users data was intentional and would not be fixed. This level of negligence is deserving of a class action lawsuit if you ask me. What a disaster!
It appears that there were reports of file deletions during the preview program.
It is rather disturbing that the update was pushed through as it was. At the very least, a warning would have been appreciated if a pre-update scan would have revealed huge amount of files which would be deleted!
It would be interesting to learn the story behind the reasoning for the targeted deletion of files in folders nominally for storing ephemeral and non-persistent files yet used for “keep-forever” files.
As for the files for deletion, was is a everything approach or a targeted approach (by date?, by extension?, by originator?).
BlueofRainbow,
I don’t know what microsoft’s criteria or intentions were, but I misspoke earlier when I referred to the Local branch, it was the Roaming branch %APPDATA% files that got lost in our case.
Edited 2018-10-08 16:05 UTC
To be fair, %LOCALAPPDATA% is supposed to be ephemeral and non-persistent. It’s debatable whether MS has a responsibility to care when third party devs misuse things.
EDIT: (admittedly, MS’s own Outlook has always used it for massive .ost files, but anyway)
Edited 2018-10-08 10:56 UTC
Except that those are actually caches. Outlook only generates .ost files for accounts where the primary location for the data to be stored is the server, and they serve solely as a local cache.
True, but someone cocked up when they made it the default .pst location too, and POP3 by default retrieves to PST and deletes from the server.
But yes, localappdata is supposed to be caches and stuff safe to randomly get deleted
The1stImmortal,
This is not \AppData\Local\Temp. On my computer there’s everything from game files, webcam settings, SSL certificates, etc. You can’t just delete this willy nilly and not expect lots of things to break. Some administrators might choose to delete/re-init data from Local and Roaming in order to reset user profiles every time they log in because they want user sessions to remain stateless. And that’s fine if that’s their desired policy, but there will obviously be data loss for many applications.
Maybe microsoft had some kind of “reset” in mind with the windows update, I don’t know what criteria they were using to decide which files had to go, but to do it without the consent of the users or administrators is seriously bad.
The1stImmortal,
Sorry, I did mean the %APPDATA% directory, which is stored in Roaming. Our app predates %LOCALAPPDATA% didn’t even exist until windows vista. So to be clear the configuration files that were lost by windows update in our case were in AppData\Roaming.
I would prefer not to loose any data in either directory during a windows update.
Fair enough. That is very much unforgivable. I’ve seen reports of people losing data from other folders too.
Strictly speaking tho, what was moved to appdata\local previously existed under “%USERPROFILE%\local settings\application data” in XP and prior. And if you’re running roaming profiles, anything under %localappdata% doesn’t roam (later compatibility hacks were added as people insisted on using this folder for more static data though)
They no longer care about consumers. They just don’t come out and say so. Windows 10 is getting the Windows Mobile treatment, a slow death by 1000 cuts. When they’re done with it all, Microsoft 365 and DAAS will be all that’s left with a sole focus on Enterprise customers. Consumers are not a big enough money maker to be anything more than MS’s unpaid QA department, until they realize that Windows is now more trouble than it’s worth. This will haunt Microsoft in the future, as more services move to the web from desktop programs, and young Chromebook users grow up and will still use them, even in their corporate jobs.
I think we can read such things for at last 2 decades : they don’t care about customers, Windows XX (put the version you want) is worst than ever, XX (name any product/company) will grow and kill Microsoft…
Focus? On enterprise? Do you have any idea how much of a headache it has become to support Windows 10 at the enterprise level? If you think we have it any easier than consumers, I’ve got a reality check for you!
I’m not a “Windows” person, so I usually keep my mouth shut about things that only marginally enter my work, that I don’t care about, and that I never admit any knowledge abou – but I think there is something worth mentioning.
Sometimes my impression is that MICROS~1 has moved a significant amount of their QA work into the hands of their users.
Did you notice the “Help making Windows better” buttons (or however they are called in the english language version, I only know the german equivalent)? What message does this convey? “Yes, sure, you’ve paid a lot of money for a PC and software you don’t actually own, and now, go ahead and do our work, of course we won’t pay you!” What is a possible conclusion? “Why should I fix your homework for free?!” So problems often get ignored, not reported, and will not be fixed. This is significant for the home users as well as small businesses who don’t have expensive support contracts – they just ignore existing problems, rebuild from backup, hope for the next update, and otherwise hide from reality. When a big corporate customer with a heavy support contract reports a problem, it’s surely going to be fixed in the next update run (or maybe even faster, if they say they’re using “Windows” in their “critical infrastructure”).
Yes, I know, MICROS~1 does actually employ professionals to do QA, but saving costs becomes interesting even for someone as big as them when they can start firing their own employees… (at least that’s a common concept to improve corporate finances here in Germany).
The “always online, always communicating” attitude seems to be established within the realm of software that deeply that is has become common to ship untested, incomplete, error-ridden, or just sloppily glued together programs because “we can always fix it later as soon as somebody notices something”. In “ye olden offlinen world”, this wasn’t possible. If you shipped a crappy program, your sales dropped, because nobody would recommend it – and those who got bitten by the problems would stop using it and switch to something else. Of course, this problem today has been “solved” by vendor lock-in, contracts, advertising, and the so called “free market” where secret agreements and “connections” decide what software has to be licensed, no matter if it suits the job best, primarily because those who decide about that software are not the ones who are going to use it later.
So why does this matter? Because “care about users” highly depends on who those users are, and more important, how much money can be squeezed out of them.
And all this seems to perfectly fit what we can currently see in “Windows” land: No matter how much problems MICROS~1 inflicts upon its users, people still throw money at them (even though “Windows” itself isn’t MICROS~1’s primary cash cow).
It’s interesting why people still pay money for being treated as unpaid test / QA workers… 😉
But you care enough to constantly write the silly “MICROS~1″…
And I’m doing this since I’m using OSnews (more than 10 years now). It’s not worth mentioning and belongs to the many (more or less funny) alternatives to writing “Microsoft” that have been invented during past decades. Is it really that hard to ignore? People are able to ignore their privacy rights, their most personal matters, even their future, but complain about that (meaningless) play on the name “Microsoft”? Wow… mankind is strange… 😉
Well then go ahead and continue, if you don’t mind being associated with the somewhat immature part of internet posters comprising the “M$” crowd. Your post would only gain if you’d simply wrote “Microsoft”…
They’ve asked users for help with QA out of necessity, not cost savings. They by definition can not test every possible hardware configuration and every possible application out there, it’s just not possible.
So instead they ask for help from the people who are actually using those exotic hardware configurations or odd applications to make sure they continue to work.
The problem lies in the fact that most of the people with exotic hardware or odd applications aren’t running insider builds, and therefore don’t see any issues until the update is already released.
That said, this particular cases sounds like they ended up with an issue caused by a configuration that’s more common than they thought it was which also happened to be unrepresented (or under represented) among their insider program participants.
They literally fired their entire QA department in 2014.
Microsoft forces its updates onto users regardless of whether or not a user is ready for the update. Now its forced updates are erasing users personal files. One person on Reddit complained that he lost 23 years of personal files. This is inexcusable. I hope a class action lawsuit is formed to put a stop to Microsoft’s practice of forcing updates. Even better, it’s time to ditch the ancient bug addled code base of Windows and create something new that is more secure, like Apple did in the early 2000s.
Had a quick scan of the reports, and in all likelihood, one of three things is happening:
1) People are only just discovering missing files that are unrelated to the update, but now have something to blame.
2) They erroneously / accidentally used an install option that erases personal content (e.g. a refresh)
3) The Documents, Music, etc. *library* configurations have been changed to include different folders. In which case when they access the libraries they appear empty, but the files will likely still be on the disk, just not in the library.
I suspect very few people understand the difference between the Windows libraries and their file system, which would mean this would easily confuse them.
I read one that suddenly had 60GB of extra free space on his C drive.
Apple? Secure?!? BWHAAAAAAAA!
Next thing you will be suggesting is people taking user interface design tips from the Gnome 3 crowd…….
Edited 2018-10-06 21:16 UTC
Oh gosh no! I don’t use Apple products either. All of my machines have been running Linux since 2003. I couldn’t agree with you more about Gnome 3.x, what a disaster! I only use MATE with Compiz (I like the old retro 3D effects.) Before Mate was forked from the old Gnome 2.x base I used KDE.
And what would have happened if his computer was struck by lightning? If the hard drive failed? If a cat had knocked a glass of water into his case (actually, that one didn’t cause HDD damage)?
Sure, the October update might have been the trigger, but there’s no excuse for not maintaining backups of some kind.
Nobody said the guy didn’t have backups. He only wrote that he lost 23 years worth of files. I have 25 years worth of files in my document folders but I also have every one of them backed up! But how annoying would it be to have to restore that many files?!?
Your point has serious flaws. First, stop trying to blame the victim. Whether or not he has backups is irrelevant. Nothing he did triggered his massive data loss.
Next, his pc wasn’t struck by lightening, had a harddrive failure, and didn’t have a cat knock water into. Those are completely different scenarios; They’re accidental while what actually happened was intentional. Windows update purposely removed data it shouldn’t have touched to begin with, without asking to confirm and without the users knowledge. That is where you lay blame, not on the user who just lost all his stuff.
Now, any sane person would agree keeping backups is a good idea, just like any sane person would agree this should have never happened in the first place.
Not only one would think with 23 years worth of files there would be a backup, but anyways, at least vast majority of that data is likely still on the disk. to be recovered by tools such as Recuva.
Uhm, OSX/NeXtstep is older than Windows NT… (and the latter, once ridden of legacy cruft / ways of doing things – but which existence is demanded by desktop users – is quite secure, as demonstrated by Windows Phone)
I think you mean ‘reuse something that’s more secure’. Apple did very little in terms of new development when they made OS X originally, it borrowed a huge amount of code from existing code bases.
I updated 3 machines without issues, two of which would’ve had intel audio issues, but had minor issues.
Right after the install some sound drivers failed to load, but a simple reboot fixed it, and that’s been going on since Windows 8.1 due to the sound card being external and relying on a service.
I updated five of my computers with only one minor issue.
Four have Intel audio, but the drivers were up-to-date, so no problems.
One has a weird glitch with dark theme on File Explorer: the headings and menu popups stay light and are pretty much unreadable because the font is too close to the background color. I made sure the graphics card driver was up-to-date, so I’m not sure what the issue is.
The other one had no issues (well, other than the typical one that Windows 10 doesn’t like me installing desktop gadgets, and I have a couple I like. So, I end up reinstalling them with each release. <sigh>)
Edited 2018-10-06 18:44 UTC
And no issues there. It was better before. I do use Windows 10 at work but still wondering what it brings beside Paint 3D and an ugly user interface and experience. And now not even able to update itself safely.
It brings enough changes to require a new certification test. CHA-CHING!!
That’s one of the primary goals of EVERY Windows version change – to resell all new certifications.
Shortlist of things which I actually like about it as an IT professional:
* They finally have an SSH client as part of the OS (cause it’s not like the protocol has been standard for almost every other major OS for more than a decade).
* They have insanely better accessibility options in recent versions (both relative to 7 and relative to earlier editions of 10).
* They have the option of automatic disk space management that actually works well.
* The newest update (the one that just got pulled) finally added native support for clipboard history.
* They have the option of predictive text input with a hardware keyboard (some people actually want this), as well as (unfortunately still not great) support for multilingual predictive text input.
* The new task manager redesign is wonderful (it looks kind of bad, but it provides much better functionality than the Windows 7 task manager).
* Support for automatically updating the timezone based on geolocation information is extremely useful if you travel and prefer to operate on local time.
* Torrent-style update downloads (what MS calls ‘Delivery Optimization’) are wonderfully helpful if you’ve got a bunch of systems running on the same network with the same update settings.
* Windows Defender actually works as a full AV option, so unless you’re being actively unsafe online, you don’t need third-party AV.
* File History is much nicer to use than the old System Image Backup, both for actually running backups, and for restoring individual files.
The only real complaint I personally have about Windows 10 other than the current update issues (which I’ve not had on any of my systems) is that you can’t selectively allow some updates to be automatic and some to not be (if you’ve got 10 Pro you can force the system to ask you before even downloading updates with a local GPO setting, but you can’t turn it off just for certain types of updates).
Microsoft started to prevent people to individually de/select certain “updates” since Windows 7. Pretending it’s for users’ sake. But you now see what it gives when you provide Microsoft with full control of you machine.
Beside, I still pretty much like Windows.
7 at least.
And XP, and 2000.
Because these works.
So did NT 4 (wonderfully in fact), yet you see no sane person still doing any serious work on an NT 4 system.
I updated a pair of devices, one a cheap tablet using the 32 bit version, and the other my main desktop. Neither have had problems. I will say I am pleased to see Edge having the option of blocking html5 video from auto playing now. It’s particularly annoying on the low end tablet as I use Edge there while I use Firefox on my desktop.
Rather a shame Microsoft is struggling with QA issues on updates. They may want to reevaluate the forced updates policy on Windows 10. I’m not saying they should abandon it outright, just reevaluate whether it’s benefiting more than harming their overall customer base.
Microsoft would be in a better position to evaluate that with their telemetry feedback then random people on the Internet screaming that because something happened to their computer, or some incompatibility cropped up on their friends/dad’s computer that it MUST be happening to everyone… or vice versa just because a some people in your acquaintance have no problems, no one else should be and it’s all PEBKAC.
Overall, the theory is good. Microsoft has had a serious issue with numbnuts telling people to entirely turn off Windows update in the past when a problem arose that simply hiding an incompatible update was appropriate resulting in widespread communal security problems that shouldn’t have occurred.
Hi,
Overall, the theory is insane. You don’t fix “quality is so bad that turning off Windows updates is the only way to avoid being screwed” by forcing people into “quality is so bad that there’s no way to avoid being screwed”. Instead, you’d need to improve quality so that people don’t have a reason to turn Windows updates off in the first place.
Note that hiding an incompatible update is impossible unless you know which update is incompatible, which means that you need to turn off “auto-install all updates” (e.g. switch to “auto-download but don’t install”) then waste ages going through a list of crap with no useful information on what each update is and cross-checking it with a third party. For a lot of people the guaranteed hassle of doing this far outweighs the “potential risk of hassle” caused by security issues.
Sure; after 2 and half decades of evolving the same code-base widespread communal security problems shouldn’t still be occurring. The fact is that every update adds more “unknown” security problems (while fixing some “known” security problems) so the overall effect is that the number of security problems remains mostly the same regardless of whether you update or not.
– Brendan
If they’re using ML to determine when to install updates or postpone them, they could determine just as well if a file is still needed for the update to take place.
For the past year or two just about any release had to contain some form of “AI” or “ML” in it.. /s
Aside from specific driver issues after the upgrade process, there was no issue with deleting files or folders.
Edited 2018-10-07 16:35 UTC
I don’t think any amount of ML can compensate for a lack of QA in the release!
Not w/ MS-DOS, not Windows the 16-bit Windows, 98, ME, XP, Vista, you name it. I have two Surface’s that I mostly use with Linux. Each time I start Windows in a month or two the update is running forever and doing erratic things. Like Onedrive setup.exe consuming 100%, never finishing, so i just keep killing it when I want to use it. Oh, and there are N-trig phantom touches and dead zones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cKIJfZkC90 needless to say, no M$ hardware for me anymore, it was a nice Linux compatible iPad replacement try, but, … oh well, I will no longer buy N-trig devices, nor any glued device.
However, if you count on the sheer numbers of computers around the globe running Windows, of course you will meet some troubles. You can’t get things to work 100% safe, especially regarding the huge variety in computers Windows runs on.
Even Apple have quirks during update process (that fanboys tend to “forget” or “forgive”) despite Apple have a control over the hardware their operating systems runs on.
So I can only applause Microsoft for the mammoth task of maintenance they provide, even though they are going downhill with Windows 10.
IMHO.
It is rather interesting to note on this story is more heavily commented than the earlier one about the actual release of the October Release ( http://www.osnews.com/story/30768/Windows_10_October_2018_Update_re… ).
Also surprised that the two comments on that story which mentioned deletion of files ended-up with only a 1 as moderation rating.
There are indications that the files deleted were in folders expected to contain only ephemeral and non-persistent files.
As the Outlook *.ost files are explicitly mentioned, it would appear that the files deleted were generally local caches of server data (or cloud residing data). Maybe it was assumed (by the Windows 10 Development Team) that such files are always retrievable on-demand from the original server – which is not necessarily the case.
The general rules about ephemeral and non-persistent files have not been consistently followed by Microsoft and the application developers. Under Windows 7 and with the default Internet Explorer browser, it has been a frequent cry-for-help by users finding several gigabytes of invisible (and non-deletable) content on their system drive and wanting to free up space from drive.
Weren’t they touting some new-fangled machine-learning-blockchain-cloud that uses AI to decide if you haven’t used files in a while that are already backed up on one-drive, and removing them locally automatically?
Sounds like this feature went mental?
Oh hell no. Never on my machines, no way in hell!