Auto-organizing mistake leads to deleted files?

[teaseui]

So, I made a mistake while trying to tweak the way Musicbee auto-organizes my library.

I had just recently set up a bunch of "sort as" tags for several artists with multiple aliases so they'd be grouped together with the primary artist.

I then had the bright idea to try to have Musicbee auto-sort the files of the aliases into the primary artist's folder by changing my auto-organize rule from:
<Album Artist>\<Album>\<Disc-Track#> <Title>
to:
<Sort Artist>\<Album>\<Disc-Track#> <Title>

Now, this actually worked fine for the tracks under the aliases, but for some reason the tracks under the primary artist vanished entirely. I tried rescanning my library, changing back to the old sort rule, even doing a windows explorer search across my whole PC, but they're nowhere to be found.

Is there any chance of restoring these files? It's not a total loss as I'm able to redownload them, but I'd done a lot of custom tagging work that I'd be sad to lose.

[frankz]

If your music files are on a local drive (as opposed to a NAS or shared network drive), deleted files will be in the recycle bin.

I don't think what you did would have deleted them, though.  Someone with more experience auto-organizing will be better able to assess.

[Steven]

they are probably in the folder: "Unknown Sort Artist".
You can easily tell where each file is locatd by displaying the "Url" field using the Tracks view in the main panel

[teaseui]

I just managed to solve it on my own - because I am using a local drive I double checked my recycle bin and realized the entire artist folders had been moved and which was why individual track names weren't showing up while searching my recycling bin - I didn't realize windows can't see inside folders that are in the recycle bin. My bad!

Thank you both for the quick and helpful replies!