Today's MCL update erased Saved Game, Mods

Started up the Minecraft launcher today (2019-07-23). It did an automatic update without asking permission. Immediately following, my 1.8 Forge installation was missing the resourcepacks folder. Forge was still functional. The contents of the mods folder and saves folder were emptied (deleted). The launcher and games are stored on a different drive (D:\Game Libraries\Minecraft) than the C:[userpath]\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft folder.

I was lucky enough to recover the deleted save files using a disk file recovery tool. The mods and resource packs were reinstalled. All was fully recovered. If I didn't know how to recover my saved game or that it should be done immediately, quite a bit of work would have been lost.