Why would deleting a user profile also DELETE all documents?

Happy Hopping

Happy Hopping

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I was working on this machine and the My Document folder has been back up.

But due to a corrupted user profile, I have to del. the user, and simply by going to User Acct. to del. the profile, Win 7 automatically, w/o asking, deleted 40Gb of data under my document.

How can that be? That a OS will del. my files w/o even asking me? WTF is this?
 
All of your documents are stored under the user profile, so when the user profile is deleted all of the data is deleted. Not sure how that's hard to understand. Look at the folder structure and you can easily see that all data is stored under the user folders.
 
It's c:\users\Name\Documents. If you nuke the name folder it's going to take everything in it. Now if you remove it via the control panel it will ask if you want to retain documents but not if you're doing it from explorer. Glad to hear you have a backup.
 
AFAIK, Windows 7 always asks if you want to keep the user's files when you delete a user through the Control Panel. See the screenshot in this article

EDIT:

Wrong pic linked, fixing...

EDIT 2:

Damn it, pic was fine - I just didn't read carefully enough.
 
I fully understand once a user profile is deleted, it del. the data. My pt. is, it shouldn't del. the data or at least ask my permission to do so.


Efishta, today on that machine running Win 7 Home Premium, it most certainly did NOT ask that question about Keep Files. Any guess as to why it doesn't?

The other problem I have in this machine is that, w/ the user profile corrupted, going back to safe mode, using the default profile, somehow it has NO restore point. But if you look at this link from microsoft,

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...ot-found/6107642e-78cc-4103-b0f3-28a9643f02b2

or this link:

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/1...-failed-logon-user-profile-cannot-loaded.html

if a user profile is gone, I should be able to go to safe mode, and pull from a prev. restore pt. So now a very good question is:

Is Restore pt. user profile dependent? Or is it hard drive dependent? I thought using any user profile, I can pull out any restore pt. to restore win 7 to a prev. stage w/ a user profile un-corrupted.
 
It should restore the profile but not the files. With regard to the deletion it did ask you unless you were holding down the shift key. It asked if you were sure you wanted to delete the folder and you clicked yes. How many times should the OS ask you to confirm you know what you're doing?
 
wtburnette said:
All of your documents are stored under the user profile, so when the user profile is deleted all of the data is deleted. Not sure how that's hard to understand. Look at the folder structure and you can easily see that all data is stored under the user folders.
Click to expand...

This is a great argument in favor of NOT storing any docs under the user profile. Instead, set up a separate set of folders for user data. Better yet, set up a separate DATA partition, so if/when/for sure when Windows goes south and you have to nuke it and reload, you haven't lost any user data. This is a lesson I learned the hard way once.
 
Ditto on that. My data are always on a separate drive. But any1 knows if Restore Point is hard drive dependent or User Profile Dependent?
 
In hindsight, log into the admin account and then rename the /users/<name> directory, delete the user profile then ceate the replacement. Copy back from the renamed directory the files you want.
 
Happy Hopping said:
Ditto on that. My data are always on a separate drive. But any1 knows if Restore Point is hard drive dependent or User Profile Dependent?
Click to expand...

OS Dependent by Drive. You can turn on system restore per drive, and by default it is enabled on the C drive.
 
That's what I thought. Then somehow that's turn off at Service.

But that doesn't explain why the question "keep files/Deletes files" was never ask when the user profile is deleted.
 
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