Premiere Pro or Media Encoder deleted 296 clips?

Hi,

I was trying to export a draft version of a video this morning and queued in in Media Encoder (note - I normally do not use Media Encoder, I usually just do it in Premiere Pro). Anyway, It seemed to be stuck on "ready" in media encoder so I deleted the export and closed the computer to do it later. A few hours later I opened my computer and premiere pro and all of a sudden it said 296 files were missing. I went to the Finder and most of my folders were empty. Basically anything that I had not yet used was completely empty but the folders were still there. Does anyone have any ideas as to what could have happened and how I could recover the files? They are not in my trash folder.

Thanks in advance,

Jordan