Our world was deleted when we tried to make it in a realm

 OK so here’s what happened, I have about six friends that like to play on one Minecraft world. So we decided to turn this one world into a realm. The world had at least seven months of work by six players on it.  We encountered many glitches because of so many entities, but we decided to make copies of the world to result in less glitches.  We finally got it to the point where we made three copies of it and it’s been like about three weeks since we’ve done another. Since then we’ve done a lot of work on different projects. Earlier today we tried making it into a realm and it got replaced with another world that was totally barren. It was a new world. We tried restarting Minecraft, deleting our last save data, deleting the world that was the realm, and nothing has worked any ideas on what we should do.