Photoshop project disappeared while working on it.

[Mrs Agena]

Hi. Student working on a project in PS2021 for 2 days on a 2020 iMac (macOS Big Sur--recently updated from Monterey). Her project had been saved as a psd file. When she was working on it today, it suddenly crashed and disappeared. It's not in her Open Recent, not saved to cloud, even the former save file that was on  her desktop is gone, it's not in the trash, or anywhere on the computer. I've searched for it as a .psd file, as a recently created file, a recently modified file, and in all the different name modifications that I could think of. When all that failed, I updated PS 2021 to PS 2022 and still no file. A couple of the most recent files that she created also disappeared when she clicked on them. The older files that appear in Open Recent still work though. 

Please help. She's a good student and I've been watching her work on the project so I know that it did exist during the middle of class, but now it's POOF, gone!

[Mrs Agena]

BTW: This copy of photoshop does have Automatic Save Recovery Information Every: "10 Minutes"

Where do I find the information on that Auto Save on a Mac? Thanks. 

[J453]

I've not heard of files just disappearing. The only thing I can think of is she saved them to an external drive that's no long mounted to the computer.