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

With this update I DID notice that some folders APPEARED to be missing. They weren't, of course, My short cut to finding them was to open the program that makes use of them (in this case the Acrobat Reader) when the most recently used documents became visible and then I simply went to C/Users/(your abbreviated email name here) and look at the folders that turned up (which all my personal ones did) and then pin the ones I wanted to Quick Access so I wouldn't have to hunt for them again.

What I did NOT do was go insane and start screaming at Microsoft that their update had deleted my files. The update is not programmed to do that, I could program it to do that by making this a "clean install" (as I mentioned earlier) or a hardware failure could cause this.

But not the update.

This may be the solution in your case. But this does not work at my pc. And i did not a „clean install“.

I want to confirm the exact same issue as Robert Ziko has reported. 

On 03-10 I read there was an update out ran the following updates from Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update:

Feature update to Windows 10, version 1809

Definition Update KB2267602 (Definition 1.27.599.0)

Definition Update KB2267602 (Definition 1.27.595.0)

Definition Update KB2267602 (Definition 1.27.571.0)

Windows Specifications:

Edition Windows 10 Pro

Verson 1809

Installed on 03-10-2018

OS build 17763.1

This is a fairly recent Windows 10 Pro install, not an upgrade for a previous version of Windows. The eventlog was purged after the install of 1809 (some workplaces would call this a security incident).

The C:\Users\kay_h\Documents folder was empty

The C:\Windows.old\Users\kay_h\Documents was removed or didn't exist before

The C:\Windows.old\Users\kay_h\ profile was nearly empty basically only contained some C:\Windows.old\Users\kay_h\AppData\Local data. It does have a NTUSER.DAT with the timestamp of the upgrade tot 1809. 

I did try to get the some files back with undelete tooling, without success. I was specifically interested in some VMs but they where very large (>100GB) and the drive had <40GB free. Interestingly there were no deleted files with the time stamp of the update, possibly the data wasn't deleted but misplaced, moved or lost by some other process then deleting.

Totally unfounded & wild speculation: The C:\Windows.old\ folder was used as a placeholder dir in the update process and someone forgot to prepare or made a type-0 in C:\Windows.old\Users%username%\Documents folder as a target for file movement. ;)

I encountered the same issue updating a Toshiba Satellite S55-C5262 yesterday. It has a very recent clean install of Windows 10 Pro from Windows installation media on a new SSD and was completely updated.

After the update in question, both my documents and pictures folders were empty. Searched for *.doc and found nothing on the drive. Command line search also turned up nothing. OneDrive is enabled on the laptop so under my User directory there are essentially two links that appear for Documents and Pictures (one for C:\Users\username\Documents and the other for OneDrive\Documents - same for Pictures). Not sure if that has anything to do with the issue. There were no files in my OneDrive prior to the update so I do not know if files in those locations are affected, but I can verify my local files are gone. That's about 250 gig of missing data, thanks Microsoft.

Luckily I backup documents and pictures on a NAS drive and was able to just recopy the files over the LAN.

I've turned off auto update on my desktop machines for now until this update is fixed.

Use Recuva or Photorec to hopefully get your files back. Photorec doesn't rename anything though, so you might wanna use Recuva more. Best off, Recuva is made by the CCleaner Team!

Just make sure you save the files to another HDD, and not the same one (AND enable Deep Scan, which will take a long time on an HDD, but it'll be worth it)

I fell bad that the Creators Update deleted all your files. I hope you get them back... :(

Every time there's a feature update, there are people who complain that all their files have been erased. But if there was a 'bug' in the update, wouldn't you think that it would affect just about everybody? We all get the same updates, after all.

So how is it that the majority of Windows 10 PC users don't lose any files at all after an update (including me?) Could there be another explanation?