How to recovery an older version of a .story file?

Hi there, Claire.  Ugh, that's the worst.  When you say that you already looked in the temp folder, I'm assuming you did so with these steps:

1) Open this folder in Windows Explorer: %appdata%\Articulate\Storyline 

2) Scan the contents of this folder for a file that starts with the name of your project. If you find one, copy it to your desktop. If you find more than one, copy the latest version to your desktop. 

3) Change the file extension of the copy on your desktop from *.tmp to *.story. 

4) Double-click the file to open it in Storyline. 

Did you have any luck using the undo button in Storyline to get to the point before making those deletes?  This question might be moot if you had already closed the file.  I'm not sure that there's much else you can do outside of those steps.