Saved games missing/deleted

Both manual and auto saves are missing when I start up the game. Several hours of progress are gone, and nothing happened that could have caused it on my side since closing the game the last time I played it. It's not just one or two saves either. With the amount of auto saving this game does, plus my habit of manual saving in every different area, we're talking over a dozen saves deleted by the game itself. 

Edit: fortunately, after having closed the game and restarting it later, the save files were back. So the fix appears to be reloading the game. However, I imagine if I had continued playing before reloading, new save files would have formed and might have overwritten/replaced the old ones. So definitely still an issue worth looking into.