Today we have a guest editorial as Steve is on vacation.

This is a sad story about a guy that didn’t do backups. It involves his personal computer, which was running fine with Window 8.1. He saw that he could upgrade it for free to Windows 10.  What did his wife say? “Make sure all my pictures don’t get lost from the upgrade,” was her one request. This was the first warning he should have taken to heart and right then and there copied those pictures to the backup external hard drive. 

Sadly he didn’t and went on blindly thinking, “What could possible go wrong with a Windows upgrade?” He also assumed he had backed up the pictures not too long ago. The truth was it had been over a year since he had backed up her pictures to the external hard drive. The computer had a RAID1 array, but no backups had been done of the computer itself.

Here is what went wrong.  He didn’t realize that during the Windows 10 upgrade you are allowed to login, but the login was with a temporary user that later got deleted. What he did notice was that all the pictures were gone. He panicked, but found them in the windows.old folder. Instead of copying the pictures to the backup external drive he moved them into the temporary profile. If this guy would have just copied them to the temporary profile things would have been fine.

Of course, it gets worse. So the next time he logs in the pictures are gone again. The temporary profile was deleted along with all the picture he moved to that profile. This time he used a shadow drive program to find the deleted pictures. Sadly again he didn’t copy them to the backup external hard drive; he just copied them on to the existing hard drive. This, of course, further corrupts the very pictures he was trying to recover.

You can imagine this guy’s wife was very upset since the pictures were gone. So what can we learn from this story? First backup important stuff. When you don’t and bad things happen take the opportunity to back them up then. Second, take time to think through what you are doing in an emergency situation. Don’t rush into a solution that just makes things worse.

Currently this guy has bought some custom software to scan the hard drive to try and recover any pictures that have not been corrupted. You can imagine it isn’t going well and his wife is still upset.

Please feel free to share your backup or upgrade to Windows 10 horror story.