tried to add user to my windows 10 log in next day all crashed and gone..

[ttodd]

So wanted to slowly add my wife as a user to use windows 10 ( try and get her off of outlook 6 in windows XP) ., so got her profile ( ran short cuts to her folders undr another drive to access her folders .., added .. but noticed everything I tried to add I need administrative approval.. so I made her administrator too..
so far so good..
the next day after I log into windows 10 from a PC reboot the PC scanned my C: drive (win10) and reported errors .. re-scanned thru.. rebooted same scenario scanned again again.. reboot attempt -no more windows 10 log in! it took me to the safe mode screen in which I had two / options) ..

1. reinstall save my folders and reinstall windows 10.. or 2. reinstall windows 10 all new . .
I picked option 1.
upon the restart I now had my wife's desktop with no installed aps' . ( I knew that ).. but all my log in (user) under my name totally gone ! .. The main account was 24 months old .. the new one 24 hours old ..

No second log in .. Just my wife.
So I have been over the past day reinstalling rebuilding and reloading al lthe aps and emails and browsers and programs etc etc etc .. question:

What the hell happened! what could I have done to prevent this? what could I have done to rescue myself? all my backups previous restore points etc don't appear anywhere .. I thought my login thru microsoft of my own Microsoft account (login screen) would reload everything . .Not ..

should I have used windows.old ? and if so how??

( I'm still not sold on win 10 over win xp but Microsoft has us over a barrel ...

thanks

[jdc2000]

Were you logging in using a local user account or a Microsoft account?

If you look at the folders on the hard drive, is there a C:\Users\<UserName> where <UserName> is the user name of your old user that vanished? If that user folder is missing, then Windows dumped it for some reason. You may be able to recover it with something like Recuva.