All previous versions vanished

It all started with a simple search in windows explorer and things went downhill from there. Start button vanished, windows maximize blank if they opened at all, parts of the desktop were black, ect. I closed the programs using the most amount of memory but this had no affect. I ended up closing most applications and later windows explorer restarted. Everything looked normal afterwards but the numerous previous versions in all my program folders and the files within were gone. I especially needed a previous version of a file in the roaming folder. Unfortunately, I don't have a system restore point andsfc /scannow found nothing. I read a suggestion on setting volume shadow copy to automatic but that had no effect either. Any help on this matter would be appreciated.

Malwarebytes found nothing. I wanted to see if a simple restart would solve it but I worry that will empty some cache and be a point of no return. I vaguely remember this happening once before though I don't remember the circumstances. After some time new previous versions were stored but not the old ones. I have some data recovery freeware on hand though I'm not sure if this is the sort of thing that would show up on a scan.