Thank you for the suggestion. I typed TurboTax tax returns on this PC in every search box I could think of and didn't get any applicable result for a 2023 file.
I may not have been clear in my initial post, but my first step after seeing my problem was to use the Windows search function in "My PC" to find .tax2023. The search function found no file. However I could find five .tax20xx files for previous years. That's how I concluded the .tax2023 file was erased.
