Word keeps deleting my files

Question

Hi, I'm a university student. I use Word. Today, it deleted 8 hours of work. I save my work all the time, every like 10 minutes. It autosaves every 5. I know where I put it. I didn't touch any files or move anything. Save, close the file for 28 minutes, I didn't even close my computer, I come back, try to open them... They are not there. Try to open them form the most recently opened tab in Word. Not there. Check the autosaves. THERE IS NONE. It's gone, it, quite literally deleted itself. No onedrive or any cloud thing. Nothing.
I only had sticky notes, Firefox, Steam (in background), Antidote and File explorer open. Nothing else.
What can I do. This happened TWICE on seperate occasions today. Never happened before.

UPDATE: After a few minutes, I talked to my girlfriend, reopened the recycle bin to show the files weren't there (which I had checked a few minutes ago) and now they are BOTH there. Seriously what is going on.

Answer 1

See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/locally-saved-word-files-with-capitalized-file-extensions-or-in-the-title-may-be-deleted-after-save-5e28f8c2-32d0-487b-b237-9c7c74d25f84 to see if it might be relevant.