windows 10 (October 2018 update) (version 1809) deleted all my files

Exactly and that is why a limit is crossed for me. I am very angry, despite not even having installed 1809 yet. I am still on 1709 for non-production machines (for production we switched to Apple). However, we start to feel the pressure again, since our 365 days deferral ends beginning of January next year. To avoid forced upgrades during holidays, we will start upgrading those left over Windows machines to 1803. No reason at all to do so, but Microsoft forces us. It’s extremely irritating and shows a huge disrespect to customers.

And now that they made a big time blunder, they are o so silent. No sorry, no nothing. They will soon just go on pushing updates and upgrades again as if nothing happened. Maybe they should simply stop doing that for a year and repair the chaos that Microsoft became. That would be a sign of respect to their users. Maybe once they should finally listen and admit that this is a dead end road. If not, Microsoft has a problem.

"Are you quite sure your regrettable data loss has nothing to do with your own failure to ensure safe and backup on thumb drive, USB-drive, NAS, whatever?"

That's blaming the customer.  Patches shouldn't hurt.  Period.

Business and enterprise customers may be moving in that direction, but I don't think the majority of Home users have any interest in Cloud file storage, as evidenced by the many opinions expressed in these forums.

As a business/enterprise customer there are files we are legally (to this point, we will see how the future catches up) not allowed to save to the cloud. As such, backups and redundancy are important, but getting the end user to always cooperate with this task is not a sure thing.

I've seen a lot (and I mean a lot) of "blame the user" responses on both the Feedback Hub and Social Media sites (Twitter, etc.) - backups are a vital part of the computing experience but so is not deleting a ton of files during a routine update.

This is a pretty prime example of why a QA team is needed. Microsoft is not a startup, offloading all of this on to the consumer is not a valid way to do business. Further, it has since come out that multiple users reported this issue on the correct channels but were essentially ignored.

We've rolled out a new GPO solely based on this issue that blocks all updates until fully validated by our internal team, step two will be to look elsewhere for enterprise solutions.

The only way that the Upgrade could delete all of anyone's files would be if they downloaded it as a "clean install" instead of just allowing the Upgrade to proceed normally.

That would be (rightly) considered "user error" and is not Microsoft's responsibility.

The Upgrade/Update does not delete files.

Period.

That's why sometimes, we need to pause and think. We can't assume that if didn't happen to our own PC, then it should not happen to others as well. A period is sometimes not a period but a comma...

I have just updated my windows using the October update (10, version 1809) it deleted all my files of 23 years in amount of 220gb. This is unbelievable, I have been using Microsoft products since 1995 and nothing like that ever happened to me.

Files were located at C:/Users/rober/Documents/

This location is still present, with no files. All of files deleted.

I am extremely upset. Not sure what to do….please let me know.

Robert

Not having a backup of your files like you should. Yikes dude.