Windows 10 October 2018 Update's Disk Cleanup could delete the contents of your Downloads folder

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While Microsoft has apparently fixed the worrying file deletion bug we’ve seen with the Windows 10 October 2018 Update – at least for testers at the moment, anyway – there’s another issue those who have installed the upgrade should be aware of, namely that a change made to Disk Cleanup now means that it can potentially clear out files in the Downloads folder.

The October 2018 Update changes this system utility to add the option to clean out your Downloads folder by simply checking a box, and that could be useful for some folks – if they want the folder to be given a spring clean.

However, if you’re somebody who wants to keep hold of the files they’ve downloaded for whatever reason, or uses the folder for storage in some way, then obviously this is something you need to be careful around if you’re using Disk Cleanup.

In other words, carefully examine the boxes and which ones are ticked to make sure that Downloads isn’t one of them. Of course, you should always take care when using system tools like this to double-check what they are doing anyway, although it’s easy to take things for granted, and miss little undocumented changes like this.

So just bear this in mind if you have successfully installed the Windows 10 October 2018 Update.

Storage Sense

As Wccftech points out, this move has also been made with Windows 10’s Storage Sense feature which aims to help you better manage your drive space, and it’s now present under the ‘Free up space now’ option.

As we mentioned at the outset, Microsoft has been busy tackling a file deletion bug with the big update, and right now the rollout has been paused because this is a major potential worry, obviously enough.

The good news is that the fix has been implemented and is now being tested by Windows Insiders, so we should see it deployed pretty soon, and the rollout can commence again.

Apparently only a small number of folks were hit by this particular bug, and Microsoft claims that only something in the order of 0.0001% of October 2018 Update installations were affected. That’s a very small number, then, but also a very small number of very annoyed people, no doubt.

Don’t forget that if you have hit problems with Microsoft’s latest update for its desktop OS, we’ve got a full guide on how to fix Windows 10 October 2018 Update problems.

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