I am quite new with QGIS and I created some maps with different layers these last weeks (seems easy but took me hours to do so). As usual, I saved everything in a folder yesterday, but today, I couldn't open my project or the shapefiles. It says "datasource is not recognized..." and, as I checked, I realized the .shx files are all missing. I read in one of the discussions here on Stack Exchange that it may be caused by an antivirus "cleaning" some folders (I have Avira).
Is it possible that Avira has deleted these files?
How can I get them back and avoid that this happens again next time?