Iclone characters deleted from project's assets

I have a number of IClone (Character Creator) characters that I imported into Unity and have been using them for almost a year without a problem. When I updated an LTS version of Unity, Unity deleted all but one of those characters. This spawned numerous errors in the project of not finding the prefabs. I have a backup version of Unity that I took and deleted all of the *.meta files and copied them into the CC directory and started Unity again. But every time I do that, when Unity is up and running, all of those characters are once again deleted. I don’t know how to get them back into Unity and continue the development of my game.