Lost all progress on FM3.

Long and short of it, i hope this hasnt been posted on before, if so ,sorry…
was playing with clubby online and noticed that my play was getting glitchy, then really unwieldy, so i backed out and went into the HD and Thumbdrive (profile) and cleaned out the unessessary things, the cache.
well it ALL went away…literally.
the progress i made in season and in regular play are gone, had to start over type gone.
wondered if my save became unstable somehow and reset? or did i remove the wrong cache?
any help will be appreciated. I went ahead and started over the game so i can finish it, or try, many seasons and years of work n racing .gone…sad, but since its a great game to play why not.
as an aside, during that session, we were able to race online with FM2!? is this a no no? and would it have been a cause of my loss?
thanks guys.

Racing is the only part of FM2s online portion that is still able to be used so shouldn’t have been the problem.