Well, I gave it some thought overnight. I felt sad and guilty for a while, then I remembered how my mom, as soon as I moved out, threw away half my stuff despite having several empty rooms in the house to keep it in, because she was "sick of looking at it." She sold or gave away most of my books and all of my old CDs. Every time I've gone back to visit her, there's been more stuff missing that I had hoped to take with me. I just barely got there in time to rescue the expensive and almost unused rock climbing gear my dad had bought me. She even throws out old photographs.
A few years back, we were playing Glitch together. It was the perfect game for us. A free platformer MMO with cute graphics, focused on people throwing parties and being nice to each other, with a big map and plenty to do despite having no combat. We had a great time. Then the developers decided without warning that they weren't making enough money off the game, and shut the whole thing down. It was sad. It was frustrating. If they had said "we're switching to a pay-only service from now on," we would gladly have paid. We didn't realize they were short on funds. But instead, they just canceled it, and it seriously bummed me out. Thing is, within a month or so I had totally moved on. But my mom? She *still* talks about how much she misses Glitch and how sad she is that they closed it. She regularly asks me if I've found another game like Glitch yet.
It's a shame our world is gone, but I don't know why I let myself feel so guilty for not preventing it from happening. It's a little messed up that she cares more about video game worlds than real-life memories. Finally, I tried installing that program to see if the files would be recoverable. I had deleted an old, unused instance from MultiMC last night (which is how I discovered deleting is really permanent), and I hadn't really done much else on the computer afterwards. I got that program going, did a search, and it only found a few of the deleted files, several of which were already overwritten - by the chat program I was using to talk to my mom *while we were deleting the files*. Doesn't seem likely the world is really salvageable at this point, and if I tell mom there might be a way to save it, it'll just get her hopes right back up. So I've decided the best thing to do is to get her into a new world as quickly as possible so she moves on and forgets the old one.