Family Historian User Group

Took the plunge and decided to upgrade from Win 7 to Win 10 last week. A complete disaster. Made a complete dogs dinner of my laptop. Unable to connect to the internet and left hanging when trying to use Windows Explorer. Gave up after trying to sort it out for 24 hours, then took the decision to do the dreaded FORMAT C:.

Lucky I had backed up my Family Tree files that took me 12 years to collect. I did full backups no matter how little work had been done. I had 3 full backups, 1 x External Hard Drive and 2 x USB MEM Sticks.

Tree loaded from External Hard Drive, all running sweet.

Yes, backups are so important, because you never know when you will need them!
Did you have backups of all your customisations (Preferences, Diagrams, Reports, Queries, etc...)?

Steve, did you follow the glossary:windows_10_upgrade_tips|> Windows 10 Upgrade Tips?

You should have been able to revert to the Win 7 image saved by Win 10 Upgrade:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... windows-81

For anyone contemplating upgrading their operating system (to Win10 or any upgrade) I would strongly recommend making a disk image of your existing system first. Then if the upgrade doesn't work, or you don't like it, you can just install that disk image to immediately get back to where you were.

The process varies a bit depending on the disc imaging software you use, how your data and programs are organised on your hard disk or disks, and where you will store the image to, so you will need to do a bit of planning beforehand. Best to do a bit of swotting up disk images via Google to understand a bit more about it.

Lots of free software available to do disk imaging, your existing backup software may already do it. If not, a very popular and quite easy to use one is Macrium Reflect: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx (no connection with them, only that I use the product).

On my PC, in addition to daily backups of my data to a number of different destinations, every month (or if there are major updates from MS) I make a new disk image and save it to a USB drive which is then kept disconnected in a drawer. It only takes about 8 minutes for all Windows and Program files, all my data is on a separate hard disk.

I'm still on Win7 and have no intention of moving to Win10 for the forseeable future, too many problems being experienced by people plus security issues. When the end of the free upgrade period approaches, I plan on taking a disk image of my Win7 system, doing the Win10 upgrade (just to get my system registered with MS), save an image of that, then revert back to the Win7 image. The Win 10 image I can then keep until I decide to upgrade (or not).

BTW: The built-in free Windows Backup utility has a disk image option for all recent versions.

tatewise wrote:BTW: The built-in free Windows Backup utility has a disk image option for all recent versions.

Though it doesn't work with big-external hard-drives, as I found recently. Sector size?

You should have been able to revert to the Win 7 image saved by Win 10 Upgrade:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... windows-81

The machine just sat there doing nothing when I tried to revert back. Gave it 2 hours, nothing.

My Laptop is 7 years old. Was purchased with Vista installed with an option to send of for a free upgrade disc to Win 7. Won't be trying to upgrade to Win 10 again.

Yes, I've seen other reports of the W10 upgrade "reversion" not working properly or not working at all. That's why I think that using an image created by a 3rd party application is more reliable, as it's not just trying to undo any changes, but just puts the whole disk back to where it was when the image was created ie. on a bit by bit basis.

It's worth adding that many of the image backup programs allow (or even recommend) that you use that program to first create a boot CD (or USB stick if your PC bios supports booting from one), then boot with that CD and use it to create your image as it ensures that none of the files on the hard disk are in use at the time. Also, using that boot CD to restore the image means that you aren't reliant on have a working OS on the hard disk to do the restore. The boot CD contains all of the files needed to make and restore the image, and is completely self contained.

That is a useful backup/recovery technique for many failure circumstances.

I believe there is an option in the Windows 10 Upgrade dialogue to save the old Win OS (in an image backup I think) but only succeeds if enough disk space! So you need not only the space for the Win 10 download ~3GB, but also the old Win OS backup ~12GB or more.

Did any of you follow the glossary:windows_10_upgrade_tips|> Windows 10 Upgrade Tips?

For my laptop, I pretty much carried out both the pre and post upgrade tips that Mike refers to - the upgrade itself (from 8.1) was a complete success and pretty much all main software (including FH) worked straight away. A couple of older programs needed some minor changes (mostly folder permissions related) and a couple of programs (Outlook 2007 and Ms Money) required a bit more work but had details well recorded on the internet.

I also carried out the upgrade on a new machine (with Win 7) - this time utilising the Image backup options both before and after the upgrade. On completion, and after checking things were working okay, I used the Windows Restore option to go back to Windows 7. After playing around a bit, I then did the upgrade again (successfully) and then used the option to undertake a Reset. This effectively took the machine back to a clean Windows 10 and thus removed all the crapware the computer manufacturer had chosen to install. Again, a success.

So, in summary, the various options for reset / restore, etc., and Image generation worked okay (for me!). I only report this to show that the upgrade is not all doom and gloom, BUT would emphasise that I did make sure I had multiple backups (I regularly backup data to local machine, external disks, separate PC and online) before I started. Personally, I like Windows 10 but I can certainly appreciate some might not!.