Rollback free upgrade with Win10 Anniversary Update?

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Good question from our own PKCano: I will upgrade my Win7 or Win8.1 PC to Win10 shortly before the July 29th deadline, the reason being the 30-day gra
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I am currently working on a sad case right now. Windows 10 got dropped on an elderly couple’s laptop without their permission. OK, they had to accept the EULA at on point. But they didn’t know it was coming, didn’t know about GWX CP or Never 10 to prevent it, didn’t know how to stop it, didn’t know not to click the “accept”, and didn’t know they had 30 days to roll back. Afterward, their 2010 Gateway laptop was having serious problems with Win10 – they called their ISP for help (didn’t know better). Then they Refreshed the PC (reinstall of OS) thinking it would fix things (didn’t know better) and it removed all their programs.

Of course, they had no backup. But they did have the Recovery Disks from Win7, so I am in the long process of reinstalling Win7 from 2010 forward.

The windows.old folder contained the backup of the original Win10 upgrade, not Win7, after the refresh. It put SOME of their data back in the “refreshed” installation – Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos. But it doesn’t consider the “AppData” folder as your data, so it doesn’t replace the information there. Where does your e-mail program store its data, mail, contacts? How about some of your iTunes information? ETC. If I hadn’t backed up the windows.old folder, as well as the User, we’d be up a creek. And the installation of the Anniversary Update would have wiped EVERYTHING out.

That is why I asked the question. MS may not automatically install the Anniversary Update in the 30-day grace period. But that may no stop some Users’ enthusiasm.

BE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP BEFORE YOU UPGRADE TO Win10.

After thought: How do the people at Microsoft sleep at night after treating their customers this way?!!!

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I hear ya. We still haven’t seen the upgrade process, so MS may put an additional warning in there for folks with windows.old folders that are still functional.

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Don’t count on it. MS wants people on Win10, and if they don’t have a way to go back, they’re stuck.

BTW I’m having a fearsome time with Win Update on this machine. 24-hours search time so far. And this morning I downloaded IE11 and did a manual install so I can access Fixit if necessary. Don’t know if I can install KB3161647 at this point – prereq’s not there.

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This is what drives me crazy. I am not the most computer savvy among my siblings, but I (also) helped my father in his last years. To take advantage of old people is just evil, and ought to be punished not with an out-of-court settlement, but with consignment to one of the rungs of Hell.

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Don’t count on a rollback because it may not work and even if it does you will probably be missing some things.

My suggestion is to leave the original drive alone. Buy a new SSD or hard drive and:

1. Clone the original drive to it. Uninstall or disconnect the old drive and save it as a backup or for dual booting. Install the new drive and go through the upgrade process.

or the better option is to

2. Do a clean install of Windows 10 on the new drive and use the license key from the previous version of Windows to activate it. This way you won’t have any trash from the old installation to cause problems. Many programs need to be reinstalled with a Windows 10 version anyway so you might as well do it with a clean installation.

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