Currently crying right now. I’ve made so many edits and imported so many photos and then just an hour ago everything went completely wrong. Here’s how things played out:

-Restarted my computer because my mouse control application (Logitech GHub) wasn’t responding. Closed lightroom, which was working fine.

-When restarting it told me SupportAssist had to check for hardware errors for some reason; it found none, and I restarted the computer and logged back in

-When I opened lightroom again it greeted me with the option to upgrade my catalog. I’ve seen this message before so without checking much I just clicked “upgrade”. I’ve done it multiple times, I don’t see how anything could’ve gone wrong. It told me it would create a new catalog that was for the new version of lightroom.

-As lightroom restarted again, nothing appeared. Everything I had was gone. It took me through beginner tutorials and everything. I went to my recent catalogues, searched through my file explorer, did literally everything in my power to recover my catalog but lightroom had somehow deleted my current catalog and replaced it with a fresh one. My backup folder was also gone. I back up my catalog once every few months (mistake, mistake, I know) but it didn’t matter because everything is wiped. Literally completely gone.

-My only slight saving grace was a backup of my catalog I had on an external hard drive from half a year ago. It’s better than losing ALL of my progress but now I have lost all of edits of like ten thousand pictures from the last few months. My neighbors probably think I’ve gone insane, which I probably have. Again, this is a lucky backup on an EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE. If I didn’t have it I think I would have lost EVERYTHING.

I have no idea what went wrong. I checked everywhere for my previous catalog and backups, but they’re just completely gone. I’m not on mac so there’s no time machine to save me. I’m just completely fucked. In the last few months, I redid my catalog, combined folders together, picked out my all time favorites from my entire collection, made presets, and did so many things that I now have to redo because something fucked up. Others have had this problem before but they all just opened a recent catalog from Lightroom’s backups folder. In my case, I literally do not have that folder anymore. What went wrong??

Please, any tips/help (or condolences if what I originally had is truly gone) would be appreciated.