I've run a financial application, Quicken, on my PC for years, ever since a colleague gave me a 'hooky' copy back in Cyprus in the mid 90s. It isn't made anymore, and my version, 2008, though correctly purchased and legal, is no longer supported and has been installed on all my PCs since 2009. I'm running W10 and it works, but one day I'm sure a version of Windows will kill it off for good.
I run all our accounts on it; current accounts, savings, credit cards, mortgage etc. It backs up after every 3 times its opened, so I regularly cull old backups to save disk space.
I did a cull of backedup data on Monday and as per usual, I emptied the recycle bin immediately (what's the point of deleting stuff to just leave it on the desktop) - that was a mistake which I found out yesterday morning when I opened the application and it refused to play. I'd carelessly deleted the most recent data file, not a backup, which it needs to open the most up to date records.
Quick google to have it answer the basic question of "how the hell do I recover data permantently removed from recycle bin" which is easy, download random software and pray, so I bit the bullet and took the last month's statements of all accounts, October, and recreated from scratch the database. All back working now, but I've lost some 6 years of records (but who cares)
The air wasn't blue, it was basicaly resignation that I am at times an idiot and too keen to delete files on the PC that I may not 100% exactly know what they are.
We keep backups on an external hard drive. Did you not have yours on an external hard drive?