Fix You've been signed in with a temporary profile in Windows 10  

It sounds like perhaps a Windows Update might have changed the behavior of this method now that there have been three instances in a row (myself and the two after me) who have lost their data by following the tutorial.

I think the tutorial needs to be modified to warn about the risk of lost data.

Brink said:

The tutorial has already been updated just this morning.

The temporary profile error is often caused by the user profile folder having already been deleted, renamed, or moved by something.

I see the change you made encouraging users to "perform the change again if it doesn't work the first time", but that doesn't warn users that they might have all their data erased which is what happened to me and the two users after me.

It's not that our profile could be repointed to the correct folder, it's that this process deleted all the data in our original user profile folder.

I managed to stop the temporary profile thing but still got issues with the profile i was using ( sync problems and several bugs).

I decided to backup everything and format my laptop and everything is fine now!

Thank you for your help!

Hi there,

I encountered this issue after a client of mine came to me and asked me to clean their surface pro 3 as it has some infected items on it. Shortly after I gave it back to them they said it had removed all their data and nothing was left in their Documents folder. Following on from that I took a look at their profile folder and noticed their data was still their just they'd been logged on to a temporary profile.Consequently I followed your tutorial to the letter and changed the associated registry entry to read thethe actual address of their Documents folder however when I rebooted a was greeted with the Windows 10 initial setup screen (softly changing colours with text saying we're setting up your new computer). I thought this was strange so immediately after logging on went to the users folder where all their data previously was to find it had all gone...!!
After conducting multiple searches through all of their C drive folders I am yet to locate their data, all 3 years worth.!! Additionally they don't have any restore points neither any cloud accounts setup

My guess is that by carrying out this change the surface has somehow thought that this profile didn't exist and has overwritten the existing folder thus deleting all their data.

Is there any way I can get their data back?

I hope so or it's not going to look good me following a tutorial on the internet and loosing all my clients data...

Regards

Hi, yes I used the correct format C:\Users\Username.

I then deleted the registry entry with the .bak next to it which had the same SID as the Temp profile and rebooted. That's all I did.
I know I didn't do anything else.....