Our wannabe fictional overlord Josh Pozzolo (aka sweatshopking) just reviewed Microsoft Windows 10's October 2018 update, and he pretty much likes it. I've installed it myself on my main box with nary a hitch, and I've enjoying some of the new features. Unfortunately, not every Windows 10 user is experiencing that kind of smooth sailing after the upgrade to build 1809. It seems that the update freed up a little too much hard drive space for some people, by way of deleting their documents.
Multiple reports are popping up at various corners of the web from users claiming that their data vanished in a puff of smoke after running the October 2018 update. Whatever bug was apparently triggered wasn't all that picky with what data it ate, seeing as many reports mention that the entirety of the Documents folder was gobbled up.
The exact cause of the issue is yet to be determined, though some folks are pointing their fingers to an erroneously-triggered Group Policy setting that would delete a user's profile after a given period of time. Having said that, some of the affected users are running Windows 10 Home, meaning they're highly unlikely to have that setting enabled. It's possible that a specific upgrade method could have triggered the issue. For what it's worth, I just ran an Update through Settings as usual.
Windows Central remarks that although Windows often saves its old installation and a copy of user settings into C:\Windows.old
, some users dug there in hopes of finding their lost data only to come up empty-handed. There's yet no official word from Microsoft on this situation, so we'd advise anyone installing the October 2018 Update to have a full backup handy.