Advice Request If you are forced to Reset install Windows 10, are you confident all your data is safe?

[Ink]

Theoretical question yet an entirely possible scenario.

If your Windows PC is unbootable (ie. no fix available), are you confident that your existing Windows set up can be safely forced to be reset with a clean installation without any data loss?

Example: Windows users with cloud storage enabled or local backups need not worry about data loss. Programmes can be reinstalled.

Can you confidently say you're part of this? Or are you at risk of losing some data?

 

[ForgottenSeer 85179]

For me this wouldn't be a problem / I'm safe.

 

[plat]

I won't know if my data was safe in Windows until after the fact. This is why I retain control over my data: by backing it up to my hard drive and then keeping it offline.

 

[Lightning_Brian]

I would failback/fall back to one of my previous disk images in this sort of case. Resetting Windows 10 can be quite dicey - trust me I work in a large corporation and have seen some weird stuff happen during a reset of Windows 10. 99.9999% of the time we are falling back to disk images vs performing a reset.

True story: Once we tried a reset on an HP 840 G6 laptop. The drivers seemed all hunky dory, but the graphics driver itself became so loopy the screen would start to act all funny at weird/super weird times. We couldn't figure out the issue until finally I pipped up and said "Hey, I think Windows 10 done goofed up here." We then did a wipe clean of Windows 10 (as in trashed everything and started from bare hardware) and the issues went away.

Bottom line: Backup, backup again, and test your backups. From there, you got nothing to worry about.

~Brian

 

[mlnevese]

I am... I have both physical and cloud backups. Only thing that would be bothersome is deactivating some software by contacting support.

 

[Gandalf_The_Grey]

I am... I have both physical and cloud backups. Only thing that would be bothersome is deactivating some software by contacting support.

Same here

 

[Ink]

My Windows happened to have corrupted today, and was forced to reset, clean install to the c:\ drive. Confident to say, zero data loss thanks to 2nd internal drive and Cloud backup/sync with OneDrive.