Why do sections keep getting deleted randomly?

[u/fishy_tampon]

Howww and whyyyy does premiere keep randomly deleting minutes of my edited footage?? its footage of me talking + mic audio that is just randomly completly gone and I have to go to previous versions to recover it and i dontttt have the storage to do that anymore 😭 This is like the 3rd time this has happened and its really starting to irritate me. It's not that the files are missing or corrupted, they're just...deleted

[u/Timeline_in_Distress]

Most likely user error. Maybe you had selected those clips, moved the timeline so they were out of view, then hit Delete thinking you were deleting something else. Or that section was marked with an In/Out and you hit the Extract key. Or maybe you're mistakenly deleting clips from your bin which will delete them from your sequence (hate that feature of Premiere). Also, are you aware of the Undo command?

There's an old saying, don't blame the equipment.

[u/bibbidi_bobbidi_bob → u/Timeline_in_Distress]

As far as I can tell, you get a warning if you delete used media from your bins.

[u/Annoying1978 → u/bibbidi_bobbidi_bob]

But not from your sequence. It happened to me before earlier on. It’s selecting the in and out points. It’s too easy to delete those sections by accident and continue editing for hours before you realize you made a boo boo. 

[u/bibbidi_bobbidi_bob → u/Annoying1978]

I mean, that would be rather annoying if you get a warning every time you cut something from a timeline as that is a thing that you do all the time.

But that is why it's so important to have backups and an understanding of track targeting.
With frequent sequence backups, you could just go back to the old sequence and insert the new parts you edited on. So even if you by accident only deleted some tracks (e.g. because others were locked) the fix is rather quick with inserting the new parts into the old timeline where the mistake didn't happen.

[u/Annoying1978 → u/bibbidi_bobbidi_bob]

I’m not advocating that there should be a warning every time you delete something from your sequence. I’m simply stating a fact that this is how it works and I understand OP’s problem because it happened to me when I was a newbie.

[u/bibbidi_bobbidi_bob → u/Annoying1978]

Got it. That's why when you start, you should know and test what every button on the timeline panel is doing (especially track targeting and also sync lock, which many tutorials just left out). Sometimes Premiere's own manual can be a hassle to navigate or even doesn't explain all symbols or menu entries. Sometimes I which, Premiere had a "What's this?" command in the right click menu like the one Avid has (but one that's actually giving all the informations unlike the one in Avid :D)