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

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... :(

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.

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“.

Robert,

Do you use One Drive ?

Do you have a folder like:

C:\Users\rober\OneDrive

Does it perhaps have subfolders like "Documents" and "Pictures", etc.

If so, what's inside those folders?

Robert, sorry to hear about it. I updated to days ago and thankfully everything went well, your post gave me the chills.

As far as the deleted/lost files, a rollback wouldn't have restored them. If they were deleted, the rollback process wouldn't had anything to restore anyway.

At Reddit someone mentioned, take it with a grain of salt, that they were able to locate their files under Public.

But, since you mentioned you already checked all of C:, if your files were deleted then your best hope is to look for an undelete tool that would let you scan your C: drive for deleted content.

Depending on how comfortable you are to dig in, the following article may help:

https://www.howtogeek.com/169344/how-to-recover-a-deleted-file-the-ultimate-guide/

Best of lucks!

Edit: I should have mentioned that Win10 also has the automatic backup feature, Files History, but I have never restored a file with it before and am unsure how effective it would be at this point.