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The Verge reports Microsoft pulls Windows 10 October 2018 Update after reports of documents being deleted:
Microsoft has stopped distributing its latest Windows 10 October 2018 Update. The software giant started rolling out the update during the company's Surface event earlier this week, but some Windows 10 immediately noticed their documents were being deleted. "We have paused the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) for all users as we investigate isolated reports of users missing some files after updating," says Microsoft on its support site for Windows Update.
Microsoft is now recommending that affected users contact the company directly, and if you've manually downloaded the October update then "please don't install it and wait until new media is available." Other Windows 10 users have been complaining that the Microsoft Edge browser and other store apps have been unable to connect to the internet after the October 2018 Update, and the update was even blocked on certain PCs due to Intel driver incompatibilities.
My Recuva trick for restoring deleted data doesn't work all the time. Recuva itself doesn't work all the time, even in the best circumstances (particularly on solid state drives). This isn't one of those best circumstances.
Note the strategic timing of the announcement. Microsoft has known about this bug since October 2. I reported on it[*], along with a workaround that works most of the time, on October 4. They waited until early Saturday morning, October 6, to acknowledge the problem and pull the plug.
[*] It may not happen to all users, but the bug is especially nasty; here's the full title and subtitle of the above-linked story:
Did you upgrade to Win10 1809 and lose all of your documents and pictures? There's a fix for that. — If, in spite of my warnings, you upgraded to the latest version of Win10, and you lost all of your \Documents, \Pictures, \Music, \Videos or other folders, DON'T DO ANYTHING until you've tried this fix.
takyon: A user in our IRC channel says that the update deleted the contents of the user's Documents folder.
Also at ZDNet.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Saturday October 06 2018, @05:35PM (12 children)
This is why I let pretty much everyone else beta test new OS releases for at quite a while before (if) I install them.
QC at both Microsoft and Apple has been shit for quite some time.
OTOH, just logged into one of my linux servers, uptime reports:
11:23:20 up 844 days, 1:13, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.03, 0.05
This machine is running quite a few processes for my home, including a local webserver I use every day with my documentation generation system (so serving of web pages / database ops / running extensive Python CGI), as well as serving as a backup node for other machines and a source of backups of itself to those machines.
I have yet to see an Apple or Microsoft OS come even close to that level of reliability; I run various machines with all three OS's here. I've been trained (by Windows) to reboot Windows every day, and I don't let my desktop OS X run for longer than it takes to chew up 16 GB of the 64GB it has... otherwise it gets reliably unreliable.
But I know I can look forward to New! Shiny! versions of both operating systems, while experiencing the joy of the current versions being left behind with many bugs unresolved, some serious, and the promise of both OS and application bitrot awaits me if I bite the bullet and upgrade.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Saturday October 06 2018, @06:10PM (5 children)
This is why I take backups seriously. Especially with how easy turn-key cloud backups are, there really isn't an excuse anymore.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 06 2018, @07:31PM
Cloud? There is no Cloud. There is only someone else's computer.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday October 06 2018, @09:38PM (3 children)
A cloud service is just hope with a subscription fee.
Actually, no - not a hope, as you *know*, one day, it won't be there.
NAS [makeuseof.com] or even just external drives [telegraph.co.uk], so your data remains "yours"
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday October 06 2018, @10:57PM
Ah, if I could only get me some of those eternal drives.
(from the "Should've gone to SpecSavers" or "Never post before copy" notes-to-myself cycle)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday October 08 2018, @08:22AM (1 child)
>as you *know*, one day, it won't be there.
Well, one day I won't be here, you won't be here, and this planet won't be here. If your approach to risk management is, "it won't last forever with 100% certainty, so it's unacceptable", then you should re-evaluate your life, the house you live in, and the country you live in.
A cloud storage service makes sense for a lot of people. They are far more likely to accidentally delete their data or break their computer than having Dropbox etc lose their data completely. Believe it or not, the major storage providers have a lot of backups and failsafes to protect the data, and if/when they go down in your lifetime, you will almost certainly be able to download your data or send it to another cloud provider.
There's always a risk, you have to be able to accurately assess your risks and decide how much risk you can live with.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday October 08 2018, @10:24AM
yes.. the heat death of the universe does provide a finite end to the need for data storage.
Arbitrary changes to TOS or someone in a data centre pulling the pin on the rack with your data is far more likely to be a problem.
By all means, use a cloud service; also have an off-line back up that you control; maybe a hard drive you keep at a friend's place, or in a safe deposit box. "cloud only" means "subject to whim of owner of the device".
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by cosurgi on Saturday October 06 2018, @06:48PM
I love high uptime too. The only thing that worries me are security vulnerabilities in the kernel. All other vulnerabilities can be fixed by restarting services.
#
#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
#
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday October 06 2018, @07:46PM
The problem is that win10 is in perpetual beta testing phase and there is seemingly no end to the scope creep of windows update and the OS itself. My win2000 system has been up for 154 days. When the humidity started going up the keyboard wasn't working well, and when I plugged in another one it reset the repeat rate (ps/2 keyboard) so I rebooted.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Sunday October 07 2018, @12:45AM
Be careful reporting stuff like that. When I did that for the web servers of a large scale production website I ran (900+ days, load average 1%), users started using an application which had an imagick bug causing the system to totally melt down. Because the application had been installed a year prior and apparently not used, it took us days to troubleshoot it.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 07 2018, @09:24AM
Expect more and more of that to appear on Linux as well, as systemd spreads its tentacles ever wider.
The core of it is that so many programmers these days start out as webdevs, and thus have internalized the "devops" way of doing changes.
This in contrast to the retiring generation that cut their teeth on maintaining mainframes and server closets that couldn't just be rolled back in a fan propelled feces moment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 07 2018, @06:47PM (1 child)
I did have an entire 2tb odd month backup drive getting erased under Linux, when SystemD was unintentionally getting pulled in during an update. The drive was mounted under tmp, and that shit software probably felt it was righteous to clear tmp, but failed to check for device boundaries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @07:57AM
/tmp is often cleared at reboot. Best to mount your drive somewhere on /var, perhaps /var/tmp or /var/backup.