In most cases the files still exist somewhere, because your system is made of text files, and text leaves copies behind in three places: the trash, the folder's version history, and whatever copy is sitting on a second machine. If none of those three exists for you, the deletion is not the real problem, and the real problem is that you have been working with no history at all.
The first thing I do when something gets deleted is stop working. Every further action on that folder raises the odds that something new lands on top of exactly what you are trying to bring back, and an agent still running in the background is precisely that kind of something new. Once you have stopped, you go through the three places in order: the trash first (the most boring, and the most successful), then the version history, which returns the file to an exact point in time rather than merely returning its existence, and finally the second machine, which usually has not heard about the deletion yet. The second machine only helps if it genuinely synced, and in our community one laptop died holding two months of work that never left it.
Deletion, by the way, is the loud failure, and the loud ones are the easy ones. What actually takes people down is the quiet overwrite: a community member pasted a broad batch of personal information and asked to "update the system", and the agent spread it across nearly every file, with no backup behind it. Nobody deleted anything there, and the previous state disappeared anyway. Removing a tool once took a whole folder along with it, quietly, without asking.
The rule I work by: saving is part of finishing the task, rather than a separate chore pushed to the end of the day. A backup you have never restored from is a rumour and not a backup, so restore from it once on purpose, while you are calm and nobody is shouting (it takes five minutes, and I am the only one on the team who enjoys it).
A prompt, on the house
Files were deleted from my system folder. Change nothing until I ask.
1. Check whether the folder has version history, and tell me the date of
the last saved version.
2. List which files are missing compared to that version, briefly.
3. Propose one restore action for the missing files only, without
touching files I have changed since.
4. After the restore, write two lines: what came back, and what did not.
Then add a permanent save step to the way you finish a task, so every
task ends with a snapshot. If there is no version history at all, say so
in the first line instead of guessing.A folder with no history works beautifully right up to the first day it does not. You install the history while everything is quiet, rather than while you are digging through the trash.
