Illustrator 24 hasn't been saving recovery data for over a year

I've lost a ridiculous amount of work the past two days with Illustrator crashing. I know, shame on me for not saving often... yada yada... that's why the settings default to save in the background every 5 minutes. Come to today's issue - Illustrator crashes... when prompted to 'Recover' files it brings up a barren untouched file, with NO [recovered] tag at the end of the file name...

When I go to the files to locate the recovery files, I see ZERO files from today's date or any date between the present and NOVEMBER 23!!!!!!! HOW THE HELL IS THIS A THING? WHY IS IT A THING!

Why is Illustrator all of a sudden tanking hard, and why is it not saving files properly???? How do I fix?