Another bug in Windows 10 October update that can cause data loss

Earlier this month, the Windows 10 October update had problems with files being deleted off users’ computers. After which Microsoft had to pause the mass rollout of Windows 10 update for October. After the issue was reported, Microsoft took steps, did testing with the Windows Insider community for finding the reasons and fixing this bug. But now there is another bug which can cause you to lose your files.

Many people having installed the Windows 10 October update have reported an issue where ZIP operations are not working as intended. Windows fails to notify as to which files should be overwritten.

On unzipping files to a folder, if other copies of those files already exist in that folder, Windows 10 usually asks whether those existing copies should be overwritten. This does not happen anymore after the update and Windows just overwrites the files. The user is not even informed that the files are overwritten.

Accidental overwrites are highly likely if the user doesn’t get any prompt or information. There can be situations where a modified file, for example, is overwritten with something original from the ZIP file. However, this happens only with the built-in Windows file manager. On using a third party tool to work with compressed files, however, this bug does not happen.

Wazhai, a Reddit user sums up the issue nicely: “The issue is that in 1809, overwriting files by extracting from an archive using File Explorer doesn’t result in an overwrite prompt dialogue and also doesn’t replace any files at all; it just fails silently. There are also some reports that it did overwrite items, but did so silently without asking.”

There is also another scenario but not widely reported where the file extraction seems to happen, but no files are updated.

This bug was discussed on Reddit over the weekend and can be read on a Reddit thread, visit their website.