I was ready to go to uploading everything and then I removed the addon from my blender local extension so I could download it from github when I was done with that (but I hadn't done that yet, neither made a zip file). But blender deleted the entire folder with all my work!
from the website:
Remove Repository & Files
Remove a repository and delete all associated files when removing. (ps I don't remember clicking or seeing a warning to delete all the files)
These changes are permanent and cannot be reversed.
Sorry to hear that sheila! If you did any of it in Blender's script editor, it could be in an autosave or recover session? Sadly that's the only built-in way Blender could bring those files back for you. Potentially you have a backup that picked it up (Windows has Onedrive by default)?
But yes, uninstalling an add-on in Blender means to remove the files too. Disabling is always the way to go unless you truly want it gone from your system. For entire repositories, Blender gives an option to remove the files as well as just unlinking the folder from Blender, so be careful with that too.
For stuff like this, I always figure out versioning from the beginning. If I'm using something like GitHub, I initialize that pretty early on and just throw it in a private repository. That way, if something happens accidentally like this, it's at least somewhere else I could bring it back.
At least I saved the old files somewhere else, but nothing from within my repository remained. I had changed some of the code in that folder and I was just happy everything seemed to be working. I'll have start this chapter over and learned an expensive lesson.
