A small percentage of Windows users have opted into the “Insiders” program which grants them early access to new features, bug fixes and content updates for Windows 10, which as I’m sure all of you are painfully familiar with now, updates very frequently. The object of the Insiders program is to “beta test” new updates to the operating system before they are pushed out to the rest of the world, presumably to catch bugs before they can affect the more than 700 million devices that use Windows 10. Well, they caught a bug, but not before it erased data on an undisclosed number of Insider machines.
What this means for you – Get backed up!
If you aren’t an Insider – you have to opt into the program – you only have to worry about fully tested updates destroying your data. I’m only being somewhat sarcastic here, as many of you have experienced some form of loss (data, time, monetary) recovering from the forced death march that is Windows 10’s update cycle, and at least one of my clients experienced a complete wipe of all of his installed applications, necessitating hours of reinstallation work. It’s important to understand that Microsoft, just like any company powered by humans, can and will make mistakes, and those mistakes will cause problems for you. Fortunately, you can counteract this uncertainty with a simple practice: back up your data. There are many options to choose from in this area – some of my clients only work on and store important data on a central server that is backed up, or, if that option isn’t available to them, they use some form of cloud backup, either self-managed or provided to them by C2. Just the other day I had a client suffer a complete data wipe (rare, but it does happen) due to a crashed Windows profile (possibly caused by a Windows update) but they were backed up right until the crash and were able to recover their data, albeit slowly. The backup paid for itself in spades that day, and saved my client from catastrophic loss.
[…] When Windows 10 was first announced, Microsoft touted the new architecture and forced, scheduled updating as a means to keep the world’s largest computing platform secure, relevant and consistent across the myriad hardware configurations on which it is used. Many of us who had been around the block more than few times with Microsoft viewed this change with a mixture of skepticism and cautious hope that it would stem the tide of security breaches and vulnerabilities plaguing the OS. Unfortunately, that tender spark of optimism was stamped out by buggy (sometimes disastrous), unstoppable updates forced upon everyone at what seemed like the most inconvenient moment possible. To be fair, Windows 10 is definitely an overall improvement over Windows 7 and 8, especially in terms of performance, stability and security, but its relatively frantic pace in pushing patches and features before thoroughly testing them has led to plenty of high-profile disappointments. […]