My projects scriptable objects have vanished again

Years ago, I started this epic saga of a tutorial that relies heavily on Scrpitable objects. Then one day I started up unity and they were all gone. Dismayed, I abandoned the idea until a few months ago when I started the tutorial all over again. Then I loaded the project again today, and again, all scriptable objects are gone. Now, the first time this happened, I suspected it was my external hard drive having been dealing with an error. So I got a new one. This time, upon starting the project over, I decided to make a new backup after each part of the tutorial in case it happened again. So, after discovering it had happened again, I just went to my backup files, but they were on the same hard drive, so they, too, had lost all their scriptable objects.
Why does this keep happening? I need an external hard drive to move the project from one computer to another so I can’t keep having this happen.

Are you using version control on these projects? If not, you should be, and it will make it easier to see where these changes happen.

Can you link to the tutorial? Specifically the sections where they use scriptable objects?

I can’t help but feel like they might be using it in a way where they aren’t actually being written to disk, such as temporary instances or sub-objects.

I will try to do that. In the meantime, I found out that, at least with this hard drive, the cord I was using to connect it to the computers was dying, and I read hardware failure like the connects can cause this sort of thing.