Windows 10 1809 update deleted all files from Documents!

Have you looked in c:\users\ to see if your documents are there under your login name?  What you describe seems like a temporary profile might what you are logged in with. We have seen this happen occasionally with Windows 7 and 10.

  I understand that Microsoft has paused the rollout of 1809 due to missing files issues, but looking in the users folder might reveal your missing files.

Do not upgrade, do a fresh reinstall. This is always the best practice. My system is broken anyway even with 1803 as it resets file associations every reboot. So it's time to do a fresh install anyway.

Will wait until end of November, then install 1809 as fresh install when all issues are resolved.

Also I don't like the "multiple destination document" ****. Who needs this crap? I want my documents on the drive and partition I want it to. And I want to KNOW where it is.

In Germany you can't use One Drive anyway, as upload speeds here are laughable. Online backups are unusable here.

And I pay 55 EUR per month, and I have cutouts and slowdowns every week. Absolutely barbaric.

First Off I Would Never do a Fresh install as Microsoft is not Paying for My Software, Nor Will they pay me the money of taking 3 to 4 days off and reinstalling and configuring my system. A Fresh Install is only viable on a New System, If your installing new all the time you'r just wasting your time. Not to mention you are being lazy not looking up or trying to find a fix, and Microsoft should already have this Fixed this is the 5th time this update has tried to install on me now and fails every time with no output log in the panther file to figure out the cause.

Hi Tom -

Alas - it gets worse. Microsoft's Backup silently stopped backing up back in February and didn't tell me, and I didn't notice. So I have maybe 100 hours of tedium ahead of me as I try to reconstruct my financial records... And the restart (3x) didn't do anything. Sigh.

Hi Stuart,

Did you try to recover your files using data recovery software? It might work.

Hey guys,

How can do I get this "data recovery software"? I new to this computer stuff and I just lost my most (if not all) of my files. Very frustrating!

Last night I updated to 1809, and it all went smoothly, but then I find that all my files in Documents are DELETED. Gone. Poof. This included many crucial documents and financial info. Yes, I have a backup (I think - using Windows Backup to a NAS). But this is pretty bad. Did no one in the first two rings run into this yet?

I understand (from the news) that this happens to all files in Documents that aren't synced to OneDrive. Further, the Documents folder is really an agglomeration of "Documents" from several different paths - not sure how that works, and it may or may not relate.

I attempted the same update and my system had the identical issues as yours. Unlike most of you I did not have a back up. I have the same question for MS. When are you going to fix this!!???

re: Microsoft needs to have better testing and qc on these updates if they're going to force them down people's throats all the time.

Amen.

re: Thankfully I can defer the updates for a year, and I've further turned off Windows update in group policy until they fix this mess.

Unfortunately that option does not appear to be available for home edition?