[StuckDuck]

> I was frankly astonished that Windows would drop them into a temporary user profile without dire warnings about its transience

Does it? I recall using Windows 7 and being dropped into ~TEMP sometimes, but I was warned with a notification.

[raffraffraff]

So I Googled this to see what they were shown...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/my-pro...

A notification in the status bar, along with their other 10+ notifications about Skype, printers, antivirus etc. They didn't see it, or if they did see it, didn't understand the implications. The horrible thing is that they didn't want to bother me with it, and tried to solve the issue themselves :(

[Someone]

On top of that, the message says (emphasis added) “files CREATED in this profile will be deleted when you log off”. In this case, the user didn’t CREATE files; they MOVED them.

I also doubt the typical user will know that profile is shorthand for user profile and know what that is.

End result: because of corruption of some data the user likely is only remotely interested in, all data they were interested in got deleted.

[jodrellblank]

The Windows 10 one (which, NB, is from 7+ years ago) says "any changes you make will be lost" and doesn't mention "profile":

https://www.windowsphoneinfo.com/attachments/97fdf7d3-6fca-4...

[mike256]

I don't think this makes it any better. Imho "any changes you make will be lost" would mean to move the files back to where they were before and not delete them.

[Thorrez]

I think one solution to this would be to treat clicking and dragging files to the temp profile the same as clicking and dragging files to a USB drive: it copies instead of the normal move.

[StuckDuck]

Agree. Still, this is horrible

[bendiksolheim]

This is probably not at all intuitive to the regular Windows user, my parents would never understand the implications of this.

[wolrah]

> This is probably not at all intuitive to the regular Windows user, my parents would never understand the implications of this

The trick here is how do we solve this other than further user education? When the user profile folder is unusable for some reason you either have to do this or just refuse login. Neither are good answers, but this one is better as long as you understand what the system's doing.

If one doesn't know what the system's doing and isn't interested in trying to understand it I don't see a way to avoid this issue.

[happytoexplain]

I see this attitude a lot, and it drives me a little crazy. All the conversations I've heard between developers and project managers immediately spring into my head. "But what if X happens", "Well, we showed them a message about it. There's nothing else we can do." This only makes sense for confirmations ("Leave this page? You'll lose your work."), and only sometimes. In most other cases, it's just an excuse to keep things simple for developers. Software can do anything you want, especially if you own the stack in question - you just have to care enough to design and pursue it. There is always an at-least-pretty-decent UX answer to any problem. In this case, some off-the-top-of-my-head possibilities are simply disabling writes, or showing a message with better wording at write time in Explorer, e.g. "This file will be deleted . . .". If a designer takes the time to think about it, they could come up many more, perhaps better, possibilities.

Hell, even just changing the terrible wording on the notification (and putting it somewhere much less ignorable) would be a step forward. E.g. "Your files have been temporarily moved to X. Any files you place in My Documents, My Pictures (etc) will be deleted when you log off or turn off your computer.").

[leni536]

How the hell did they have read + write access from the temporary profile to the old one? Shouldn't the tenporary profile belong to a distinct, temporary user account?

Or the move opration immediately prompted for admin authorisation, and they just clicked through that? (not suggesting that these prompts are in any way useful for the average user)

[cesarb]

> When the user profile folder is unusable for some reason you either have to do this or just refuse login. Neither are good answers, but this one is better as long as you understand what the system's doing.

As this whole discussion shows, no, this one is worse since it can easily lead to data loss. A third option, however, would be to do this but not erase the profile on logout.

[bscphil]

Or an even better fourth option: the warning message literally says "you cannot access your files". https://i.imgur.com/6jk6imp.png

That is apparently false because the user did access their files and dragged them into the temp profile.

Either that should be literally true (a completely broken profile is a bad problem that needs help from a competent tech support person) or the profile should at least be made read-only until the entire profile is deleted. That way they could copy the files into the temp folder, but not lose anything (other than changes) after logging out.

Also, the warning should be more obviously "fatal", not something to be clicked through. E.g. replace the desktop background with a black screen and put the warning text in red on it.

[timbit42]

No one reads notifications. They just click OK so they can get to the desktop.

[bryan_w]

They'll read it next time, most likely. This is how people learn.

[raffraffraff]

Someone in their 70s just blames "that stupid old laptop" that their brother told them to replace last year, but they wouldn't listen. The underlying cause is never found, the pop-up message wasn't read. The laptop is just an asshole. They'll go to the computer store and buy a different laptop that isn't an asshole.