Windows 10 Upgrade.

[NoshowJones]

Just recently without warning, a notice came up on my screen wanting to give me an upgrade, it offered me a choice of what time to do it.

 

I decided to let them do it immediately, it took a while, maybe as much as an hour. When I switched back on, everything, all the things in my Documents, and everything else

including Youtube, my Banks, my Outlook and Yahoo mail, etc, had all disappeared, even my IDM download which I can't get back even now, and was paid for.

 

All my documents were backed up in a hard drive, but it took me hours to get everything else back again. How can I make sure this never happens again?

[The Fat Controller]

Did you check via Windows Update that it was genuine ?

 

Even the most recent enormous W10 Fall Creators Update (1709) did not wipe any data for me.

 

I would go back to the Update History and make sure what happened was actually from Microsoft !

[RichCor]

Before taking an upgrade or update, use something like Macrium Reflect software to create an exact image of your working PC and store it as a file on an external hard drive.

 

If you ever encounter an issue with an upgrade/update, or a virus that can't easily be removed, you  can use the software to entirely wipe your PC hard drive and replace the contents with the image you previously made.

 

While some people create a single image as a restore point, and then use something else to backup data and restore afterwards, the software can be set to create IMAGE files at a set schedule, or image files and differential files that can be used to rebuild a system to any date the backup was made.

 

I usually suggest splitting the Hard Drive into multiple partitions, so the Boot/OS/Apps are on one partition and the DATA on another to more easily facilitate a full system recovers (Boot/OS/Apps, or Data, or both).

 

For people on previous versions of Windows, there are utility apps, like Never10, that can be downloaded and installed that work to prevent the older operating systems from ever seeing an upgrade message or being tricked into automatically upgrading to Win10 without the user ever being asked.

[NoshowJones]

19 hours ago, The Fat Controller said:

Did you check via Windows Update that it was genuine ?

 

Even the most recent enormous W10 Fall Creators Update (1709) did not wipe any data for me.

 

I would go back to the Update History and make sure what happened was actually from Microsoft !

This same thing happened a few months ago, I let it happen and after it was finished, everything was the same again. It certainly is genuine. I just want to make sure this does not happen again.

[NoshowJones]

16 hours ago, RichCor said:

Before taking an upgrade or update, use something like Macrium Reflect software to create an exact image of your working PC and store it as a file on an external hard drive.

 

If you ever encounter an issue with an upgrade/update, or a virus that can't easily be removed, you  can use the software to entirely wipe your PC hard drive and replace the contents with the image you previously made.

 

While some people create a single image as a restore point, and then use something else to backup data and restore afterwards, the software can be set to create IMAGE files at a set schedule, or image files and differential files that can be used to rebuild a system to any date the backup was made.

 

I usually suggest splitting the Hard Drive into multiple partitions, so the Boot/OS/Apps are on one partition and the DATA on another to more easily facilitate a full system recovers (Boot/OS/Apps, or Data, or both).

 

For people on previous versions of Windows, there are utility apps, like Never10, that can be downloaded and installed that work to prevent the older operating systems from ever seeing an upgrade message or being tricked into automatically upgrading to Win10 without the user ever being asked.

This seems like a lot of good advice, but I do not have the computer literacy to follow it, but thanks for trying to help, if I could just be certain that this does not happen again. Surely no one, Windows 10 or Microsoft should have the power to do things to my computer without my permission.

I have got along for years with cleaning up things like spyware, driver boosters, etc without Windows 10 or Microsoft doing things like this to me.

[JSixpack]