Can't leave windows insider program!

Hello! I joined the Canary channel of the Windows Preview program. Now I want to exit, but according to the method on the official website, I cannot choose to retain personal data when using a USB flash drive to reinstall the Windows system. How should I do to keep my data and quit Preview?

@fg2001

Thanks again for the info. Please excuse my ignorance, but re your last sentence "always keep a system image backup of a good working released public build system to revert to" - are you referring to keeping everything totally backed up. I have Carbonite backup - is that what you consider a "good working released public build system"? I just want to make sure I'm correctly understanding what your were referring to. If I'm incorrect, it would help if you could explain further. Once again, I appreciate your help.

@EileenFazzini,

The current public Build is 22621.2215, which is working without any major problems.

Before updating or experimenting with any insider Build, I save a complete System Image backup on a separate Internal or external drive.

I use the Backup utility built into windows; it still works fine. I don't need to use any third-party utility.

All my data is on a separate internal drive and the C: drive is only used for the Windows operating system, so it is relatively quick to backup. The utility runs from the control panel.

If I need to restore the system, I just boot from a USB installation media and use the option to restore the system image from the backup drive and that brings me back where I started. 😉

@fg2001

Thanks again for the info. Please excuse my ignorance, but re your last sentence "always keep a system image backup of a good working released public build system to revert to" - are you referring to keeping everything totally backed up. I have Carbonite backup - is that what you consider a "good working released public build system"? I just want to make sure I'm correctly understanding what your were referring to. If I'm incorrect, it would help if you could explain further. Once again, I appreciate your help.

I totally agree. I'm glad you and others have had this problem. Believe me, I didn't pick the Dev channel - I didn't even know I was enrolling in this horrible program. A lot of people posting here have said the same thing. You think you're requesting info on what the program is, and before you know it, you're enrolled and put into a channel without choice or reason! I've reported this to Microsoft but no one cares. Thanks for keeping me sane!!!

@EileenFazzini,

Sounds like you learned a sad lesson the hard way. 😝🤬

I've been working with insider builds for over 10 years and never had one installed without my specific consent.

That doesn't mean that I trust Microsoft, they take forever to fix bugs and they keep pushing new useless experimental features instead of fixing the reported problems. 🤬

Insider, builds are only meant for users that want to try out and test the latest changes that MS is experimenting with.

The insider builds are never stable and could have plenty of bugs.

They should only be used on spare machines, not on a regular production machine.

Even in that case, I always keep a system image backup of a good working released public build system to revert to, in case anything goes wrong, I just restore the good working system. 🤷‍♂️

What is the Windows Insider Program? (microsoft.com)

I totally agree. I'm glad you and others have had this problem. Believe me, I didn't pick the Dev channel - I didn't even know I was enrolling in this horrible program. A lot of people posting here have said the same thing. You think you're requesting info on what the program is, and before you know it, you're enrolled and put into a channel without choice or reason! I've reported this to Microsoft but no one cares. Thanks for keeping me sane!!!