Thank you very much for the information. I had saved the project often while making it under name1, name2 etc., but unfortunately I saved them in the same file as was deleted. I was making a copy from my pc to an external hard drive when Windows decided it had to update. This was 2 years ago when I was making my other son's graduation video, which was a week before shutdown so I wasn't able to bring it to anyone. I did run 2 different file recovery programs and knew exactly what I was looking for. We were able to recover a handful of pictures, but they were fragmented. The others are lost. We tried on both the laptop and the hard drive. The file had close to a 1000 photos in it. I foolishly still had them all on one pc. They had been saved on multiple disks and memory cards. I was trying to get organized and had succeeded with his photos. When I started my youngest's video I knew I needed a copy so something like that didn't happen. There wasn't anything in the recycle bin from that folder, even ones that I had deleted manually, my latest back up was corrupted and they were removed from Google Photos. I know Google can remove from the pc, but didn't know the pc could remove from Google. What's worse was my son was in Basic Training at the time and we were in the beginnings of a pandemic. After trying to recover the photos, I transferred everything of value onto my new laptop (and another hard drive) and put the old one away. My younger son who's studying at Umich to be a computer engineer wants to take a look at the old laptop and see what he and his friends can do, so I was double checking what was left and found this file. Now that I know what to look for, I will do a search and hopefully I will find the Autosave the program asked about.
I will let you know if I am able to find and open the file and if the pricey tuition pays off. 😁 Thank you for your help.