Folding Forum

Hello Everybody,

today I uninstalled Folding at Home v7.5.1 from my WIndows 10 over the Windows Programs and Features and I checked the box to delete the Data.
And the uninstaller completely deleted my User directory "Documents".

I saved the details of the uninstall and here are some lines:
"
Remove folder: C:\Users\baXs\Documents\my games\
Remove folder: C:\Users\baXs\Documents\My Music\
Remove folder: C:\Users\baXs\Documents\My Pictures\
Remove folder: C:\Users\baXs\Documents\My Videos\
...
Remove folder: C:\Users\baXs\Documents\
Completed
"

And it is all gone.
So why would the uninstaller do this? Did I something wrong?
These folders are not linked with the software.
Fortunately there where no real important data, hopefully, I cant check it anymore.

Please check the software for bugs.

Best regards
Daniel

This is my guess.

I am very careful to always use the express install so I use the default file locations. If I ever did un-install F@H sometime in the future, it should remove the data in those default directories. If you alter the directory F@H is going to use to store data, it would be a very good idea not to put other files there.

I am betting you did not use the express install. It is just a guess.

JimboPalmer wrote:This is my guess.

I am very careful to always use the express install so I use the default file locations. If I ever did un-install F@H sometime in the future, it should remove the data in those default directories. If you alter the directory F@H is going to use to store data, it would be a very good idea not to put other files there.

I am betting you did not use the express install. It is just a guess.

No, I did not. The details shows the directories from F@H is on another partition.
"
Delete file: D:\Programme\FAHClient\About Folding@home.url
"

The the uninstaller should only remove the user data associated to the program but obviously it deletes more.

regards

I defer to your expertise, as I have never been tempted to un-install F@H.

Welcome to the F@H Forum baxs,

Sorry to hear about your potential data loss.

I noticed that you have these two paths in your post:
C:\Users\baXs\Documents\
D:\Programme\FAHClient\About

Those are not the default paths for installing F@H Software. Below are the default paths on Windows 10:
C:\Program Files (x86)\FAHClient -> This is where the F@H Client is installed
C:\Users\PantherX-H\AppData\Roaming\FAHClient -> This is where the F@H Client downloads WUs and FahCores

On Windows 10 when I have uninstalled F@H Client, only the FAHClient folders were deleted (I ticked the box to delete the data during uninstallation).

Given that you have two different drives in use, is there some kind of Symbolic Links going on your system: https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/c ... -or-linux/

Yes, this is quite a serious bug with the installer / uninstaller

I once chose my app data directory to install to and that became the data directory. Ideally the installer should automatically append another directory depth to selected folder/fahclient

When you uninstall, it just blats the entire contents of the directory - not just folding files / folders. Potentially very upsetting.

I found out the issue and it was reported in 2010 and I have updated the ticket with the information in this thread: https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-issues/issues/107

For recovering your files, I'd suggest Periform Recuva. It should be able to scan the NTFS file system and recover the files in your home directory. Been using it for about four or five years now.

Data Recovery, man why did I not have that idea. Sometimes you don`t see the forest
Thank you for the hint so there was not much data in the directory, only some save games from my games.

And I figured out what went wrong.
So I used not the default settings from the installer, but the installer put the work data which I downloaded for folding just in C:\Users\baXs\Documents\ without an extra folder for F@H.
The uninstaller took the whole directory as the F@H directory for the user data. As I included the Data to be erased, the folder got deleted, because the individually files from F@H where stored there.

Unfortunate for me, but thats life. Now I have a schedule to backup my data. Be careful when uninstalling.

Best regards
Daniel

@ baxs when you were asked where to install FAH's work files, you probably specified C:\Users\baXs\Documents\, replacing the default setting of C:\Users\baXs\Roaming\FAHClient or something like that.(i haven't installed in a long time so I'm not sure what the default would have been.

The point is that the default path ends in \FAHClient and the installer expected to find an empty directory \FAHClient which the uninstaller should remove. The assumption that you knew that and that \Documents was empty and could later be installed was a poor assumption, but I think you can see what happened when the uninstaller proceeded on the basis of that faulty assumption. Had you specified C:\Users\baXs\Documents\FAHClient the uninstaller would have worked correctly, removing \FAHClient and its contents but not touching anything else in \Documents.

You're not the first one to encounter this issue.

This will be fixed in the next release of FAHClient.

Uninstall deleted yesterday all files in %appdata%/roaming! (Windows 10).

1) 7.5.1 for Windows had a bug where it deleted all files in the install directory. If you did not use the defaults, this was a risk.

2) it is fixed in newer clients.

Do you mean %APPDATA%\FAHClient. The environment variable %APPDATA% should already contain the entry "/roaming" and it should have been an empty directory when FAH was installed. The uninstaller is supposed to remove everything that it put in a directory that's initially empty.