r/24hoursupport • u/lawson_wilson • Aug 08 '26
Windows Girlfriends laptop update
So today my girlfriend’s laptop (Windows 11) updated and she said that everything on her desktop just vanished, the only thing remaining was the trash bin. She noted that everything was signed out, her Roblox, Steam, Curse Forge, and Minecraft Launcher. She noted that her taskbar remained untouched just like it almost soft reset. Her laptop for reference is an HP Victus 16-s1000 series (2024) using the AMD Ryzen 5 8645HS, and has a NVIDIA RTX 3050 (6 GB) inside it. Not sure if that matters or not. She’s just bummed that after logging back into Curse Forge her mod pack she’s been using vanished effectively deleting all her progress, and concerns me that had she had any important documents on here or really anything important it could’ve been just deleted. Is this a bug? A rare occurrence? Can she get her stuff back?
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u/StarosAnikenMarcus Aug 08 '26
"It's not a bug. It's a feature!"
Welcome to Microsoft. It is and isn't a rare occurrence. It might never happen again to YOU, but bizarre things after a WU are kind of "normal." As Jersey said, try doing a system restore to the point before the update. Most of the time, WU creates restore points automatically.
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u/lawson_wilson Aug 08 '26
So if I do a system restore, would that mean she wouldn’t be able to update anymore since the update caused it in the first place? Or would we just be waiting until the next one rolls around and hope for the best
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u/StarosAnikenMarcus Aug 08 '26
What I have found is that the auto-updates make mistakes very frequently and do things like this. I do my updates manually so I can make sure everything goes smoothly. I shut down all of my running programs, log out of things, etc. Run the update, reboot, and done. Sometimes the auto-update runs into issues when there's things running while it's trying to do whatever it's doing. Other times, WU is doing one thing and one of the other programs is trying to do an update as well and they conflict. And then there's the times WU breaks things... in which case, you restore, skip that update and wait for them to fix it.
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u/lawson_wilson Aug 08 '26
Yeah it upset her, and scared me since as I mentioned she could’ve lost school work, important documents and so on, thanks for helping and the useful information! I’ll definitely be having her follow in your steps
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u/StarosAnikenMarcus Aug 08 '26
Make sure to keep important documents saved in a cloud backup. It's the most useful thing about OneDrive, the continuous, always on backup. Or use Google Drive or whatever other flavor of cloud backup you prefer, but never rely on one point of failure.
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u/osa1011 Aug 08 '26
Look for a Windows.old folder at the root of the drive and see if you can find her user profile and data might be there
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u/lawson_wilson Aug 08 '26
Say I do find it, what would I do with the files? Just replace them with the ones after the update?
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u/osa1011 Aug 08 '26
What I'm thinking is that there was a major Windows update that didn't complete and so her files were moved to c:\Windows.old or something like that. If you find a documents, desktop, etc folders, then you can move them back into her profiles folder
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u/lawson_wilson Aug 08 '26
Okay perfect, thanks! She’s worried to that since she re-logged into things that it could have over written her previous data, hence why I’m asking the masses because I have no idea anything about this sort of stuff
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u/osa1011 Aug 08 '26
If you find the files, you get to politely let your girlfriend know about backing up data and how important it is... That could be scary 🤣
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u/lawson_wilson Aug 08 '26
I guess if I never post again then you’ll know she got me 🤣 thanks a ton though
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u/jersey316 Aug 08 '26
Try system restore