Windows 10 patch wiped my files
Joe Boy

Windows 10 patch wiped out my documents!!!

/0 Comments/in /by

Ok so imagine you turn on your computer and Microsoft does another one of their normal patches and when you go to your do your work you notice all the files and folders in the my documents folders are gone.  This is a reality for a number of Windows 10 users this week.  In a number of forum posts on Microsoft community site, there were people complaining about the Windows 10 1809 update patch and that it deleted all their documents.  People were not affected if they happen to be using the one drive service but anyone else lost all their work.  A few people got their stuff back because they had a working backing.  (reminder to think about if you have a good working backup like YCS Backup)  Other just lost all their work.

Microsoft then decided to stop the update and request people affected to call them directly.  Microsoft made a post stating; “Microsoft has pulled Windows 10 version 1809 from the Software download page, Windows update and update assistant as of today. ” They explained they have paused the rollout of Windows 10 October 2018 Update 1809 for all users they investigate isolated reports of users missing some files after updating. Lucky for most users Microsoft did not add this update to the automatic push system yet. The only people affected are those that checked for new updates and ran the new patch.  Some people did receive errors just trying to install the update.  This was do to using an Intel Display adapter.  Intel already released a fix for their driver to ensure it will install. But we are telling people to wait and not risk your data by installing this update.

It seems the error all comes down to a group policy that removes a profile that are older than a specified number of days on a system after restart.  Microsoft will not confirm this but so far many system admins are claiming that if you disable or set as not configured the group policy you are able to run the patch and not loose all your stuff.  As far as for YCS, we are telling our clients not to run thew new patch until it is repaired and if you have any question be sure to call the office at 407-826-0810 and ask for Joe Boy.  We will be happy to assist you with a proper backup system and to check to ensure you are not running this update at this time.

Joe Boy

Why we don’t always suggest cloud services

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

Today I was forwarded a story from a friend. This is one of those that really makes you think about cloud services. A staff person from a software company with roughly 100-150 employees was pulling a joke on a friend and because of his actions the company he works for lost access to their files and emails for over three days. So to start a guy like to play jokes on his friend. His friend is an app developer on the android framework and had just released an app. The guy purchases the app and make a copy of it and then immediately refunds the app. THen he messages his friends with a copy of his own apps saying look what I got online for free. Pretty lame joke but for a techie it is kinda funny. But this does break google’s terms of agreement with the guy pulling the prank.

So google bans the access that this guy has to his account. He can log in but is not allowed to do anything. The only issue is that his account is a company account so google banned access to all the accounts in that domain. (ie, The entire company) That means the staff can no longer access their google drive account and can’t access their documents on the cloud. To make matters worse anyone that used their personal google account to be the recovery email for their company account also got banned for their personal account. Which mean mothers could not get notifications from their schools and it interferred with peoples personal business.

Now dont get me wrong, if you do bad things on gmail or other google mail services I want them to ban you, but to ban the entire company makes for a completely different thing. Also their IT department has been unable to get anyone from google to help since they were banned for breaking the Terms of Agreement. So here is what we at YCS can take from this story… First if you ever use a cloud service you should still retain the acess to your files or a backup of those files no matter what. If you use a cloud service for email be sure that you use a service that will not punish all accounts for the actions of one. Microsoft 365 exchange for example will only stop the account that is causing the problem and not the entire domain.

So what do we suggest. If you are going to use a cloud based service just be sure you have a backup of your files somewhere else. Even if you use a syning service like dropbox it is always a good idea to have a backup of those same files with a different company or on your own hardware. Nothing beats having your stuff on your own hardware. We run email on our servers as well. But if you decide to use YCS email services or MS exchange or any other service just ask your IT professional to go over the differences and ask for suggestions. We are always able to provide answers to your questions and help design a good IT infrustructure for your business that will have redunant ways to get to your data just in case something were to fail. You can reach one of our techs at 407-826-0810.