greyed out regions in tracks

[urumita]

and italics in the region bin. The workspace browser can't find and relink a whole song.
I wasn't there when it happened
Our normal process is to remove or delete unused regions from the audio bin before copying a session to another drive for safety, like cleaning and spot erasing in the old days.
When you do this the region names disappear from the region bin, no?
Last night I thought that my assistant had inadvertently highlighted "select all" instead of "select unused regions" and wiped out the whole song but this is impossible because all the region names are still in the bin, they are only in italics and greyed out. All of the regions are intact where they were in the tracks except that they're greyed out, interestingly all the fades are not greyed out and still playback. He says that he performed our normal procedure and that nothing seemed strange until the end when all the names appeared in italics and all the regions in tracks were greyed over and 10 midi regions appeared out of nowhere.
What could have happened?
I've now backed up and unmounted the disc, looking to get a recovery program that can check if the file are recoverable.
If they were deleted in the normal manner then the region names should disappear from the region bin but they're still there!
does DIGITECH SUPPORT have any ideas, first I thought it was operator error but now it seem like something else.

G5 DP2GHz 2.5 GB RAM 160GBSATA, 250GB SATA, MAGMA 7 PCI chassis, SNS SAN AV 4x36GB, Control24.
10.3.8, PT6.7cs7