A bug or not, this is an act of development incompetence coming from Microsoft in which the latest major update to Windows 10 caused the personal data to be removed due to a bug. Microsoft was aware of that bug but it was a serious technical offense among users regardless of whichever edition of Windows 10, whether the OS is for home and personal use, work or even school use. Such kind of unexpected data removal is irreversible and who knows if you have time to find the technical culprit that did this to your data.
Backing up data has been an important policy and if things like this happen to you at anytime like the program you use does more than what you instruct it to do for instance, the consequential events are irreversible. I had a past time in which the cleanup program did more than what I instructed it to like it took out my data that was stored on my local account and that was like several years ago. Nowadays, I've been skeptical on what the same programs will do but obviously, the culprit is supposedly something else I don't know of.
Before I wrote this blog post about Windows 10 1809 update, I already did the data backup out of my concern that the same thing from my past may happen again once I update my current computer to this major update. Even the newest Windows Server was affected by this situation that the revised release would be needed and recently went GA stage this month.
In case of some editions of Windows 10 in which Windows Update's update method cannot be made Manual or even Disabled, this update would become a next update without your knowledge in which your computer would be patched even after a series of delays and then all of a sudden, your data was like gone after this patch. Who are you going to blame for this incident, huh? Do you go after a specific individual or group or even Microsoft for that? Also, to make false suspicions that someone from your house had tempered with your stuff EVEN THOUGH NOBODY DID THAT over this update was going to be plain stupid in my opinion and to install the goddamn security camera over the area your computer is situated in is another stupid thing I can imagine of.
As of this time, I'm still at 1803 but things are expected to change in the future provided that future updates DON'T mess things up. What about those saying that there was no such incident as this as if this whole thing is fake news to them? Well, just ignore them. It's like they're trying to deny the serious technical incidents that already happened out of their ignorant defenses. Even the official explanations regarding this incident can be found in Microsoft website as evidences.
Oh, the hybrid synchronization between your devices and the cloud service doesn't fully count as a regular backup to me as indicated from my past time that once I initiated the cleanup, the program did more than what I instructed that even my data was removed. Perhaps, removing the Windows Temp files caused that kind of shit to happen or something. And when that happened, data stored on the folder that is being synchronized to the cloud storage would be gone from both my devices and the cloud service. The only backup left would be on the other computer involved in the same synchronization as well but how do you restore the data from that computer? Firstly, that computer must be completely offline so that no synchronization will happen and then you copy the same data from there to the computer whose same data was removed. Then, you synchronize the data stored on the affected computer again to the cloud. So, if you have Dropbox on both computers, you essentially have the same data on them and the cloud storage but if something like that incident removed the data stored on one of the computers, the same data would be gone from the cloud storage. The other computer still had that data by then but if you make it online with Dropbox active, that same data will be gone from it as well.
If you do have data stored on the other drive in which your account folders would be there as the default location and something like this incident happened, chances were, the data on the main drive where the OS is stored would be gone or something according to some description involving Known Folder Redirection.
As of this present time, the 1809 update was re-released that it may be safe to get and move on. The overall lesson is that, when technical incidents like the Windows 10 1809 update's removal of user data happened, you cannot anyhow put the blame and take disciplinary actions without knowing the culprit behind them.
