Could installing ver. 1703 accidentally have removed my personal files?

[S 187]

Hey folks, I've been on 1607 (Anniversary Update) until today when I finally received a message via update center that I can now update and move on to ver. 1703 (Creators Update).

Anyway, after it was finished installing I noticed something. Right before installing 1703, I had 46.4 GB free of 190 GB on C disk and 137 GB free of 273 GB on disk D. After updating it was 39.3 GB on C and 166 GB on D. I then had to restart my laptop cause of Bitdefender, so after restarting my laptop I noticed that it shows 137 GB once again on disk D. However, disk C shows 39.1 GB.

My question is where did those 7.3 GB go?

 

[DOGC_Kyle]

My guess is that it could have been one of two things:

The installer files for the new version. Uncompressed, they're probably about that big. The files would have downloaded and uncompressed automatically in the background before you actually started the upgrade, so that's why you might've seen the extra 7.3GB.


Or, it could be the actual OS files.
When you do the feature upgrades, Windows actually downloads the whole OS and installs both versions at the same time. When you restart, it makes the new version the default, but the old one is still installed (just disabled).

The old one is kept for 10 days, so you can roll back easily. Since the old version is still technically installed, it's pretty quick to switch back to it. So if it's been more than 10 days, it might have been the old version was removed automatically.

 

[DOGC_Kyle]

My guess is that it could have been one of two things:

The installer files for the new version. Uncompressed, they're probably about that big. The files would have downloaded and uncompressed automatically in the background before you actually started the upgrade, so that's why you might've seen the extra 7.3GB.


Or, it could be the actual OS files.
When you do the feature upgrades, Windows actually downloads the whole OS and installs both versions at the same time. When you restart, it makes the new version the default, but the old one is still installed (just disabled).

The old one is kept for 10 days, so you can roll back easily. Since the old version is still technically installed, it's pretty quick to switch back to it. So if it's been more than 10 days, it might have been the old version was removed automatically.

 

[S 187]

Thanks for the clarification. I hope you're right!