After an upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10, there is a windows.old folder in the root directory of c:. Within windows.old, there is a \Users folder, and within the \Users folder there are child folders for the user accounts that were on Windows 7, but none of the child folders have data.
This is not a disaster as I have an image backup of the partition, but I find it damned curious and wonder how this might have happened. Anyone have a idea?
Not that I know of, but I'm not the only one with access to the machine.
However, as I understand it, using disk cleanup (clean system files) would remove the entire windows.old folder. In this case the folder is still there, there's just no data for users, although the user folders are present, i.e., there's \Users\ron, but the folder ron is empty.
Instead of looking in Windows.old. if I remember correctly, look in your Win10 users folder(turn on hidden items) and see if there is an extra folder from the upgrade there, I can't remember what it's called(already clean installed on both PCs).
I found an obscure Technet item that indicated this could happen if the upgrade process runs twice in succession...the first upgrade creates the normal windows.old folder, the second creates a new windows.old folder over the first, but there is no user data since the user accounts haven't been set up yet.
I seem to recall that when the upgrade ran on that machine I did have to answer the setup questions twice...which I found a bit odd, but since things seemed to be working I didn't think much of it. Now, why the upgrader would run twice...
I was hoping to find a copy of a document I had intentionally deleted from my Windows 10 installation and then decided I wanted back. I knew it had been on the machine at the time the upgrade was done, and I thought I could just pull a copy from Windows.old instead of having to go through the monkey motion of getting it from the backup image. I was surprised to find no user data in Windows.old and that made me curious.
Check where Cliff S told you if find it there. Even though made a system image, all files like this (e.g. Documents, music,videos,pictures) should be always put on a backup drive, told in tutorials here and many other places before upgrading.
We all learn from our mistakes, not sure how to retrieve it from image or anywhere else.
rb did you happen to sync your documents with OneDrive on the previous OS? Even if you deleted it Onedrive has a recycle bin too that must be accessed from the internet(not from win7 or win8 but from the browser) to be cleared. This has helped me twice when I accidentally deleted a couple of scripts I needed later on(almost as easy to recover as from File History if I hadn't cleaned it out too).
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