2 years of work have been erased... Garden Vale has been eradicated due to a decision to go through with a system refresh.
What happened?
My computer had been suffering from high disk usage due to what I eventually identified as improper page sizing. Upon restart after inputing the correct page sizing information, disk usage only remained at 100% in the first 3-5 minutes following boot-up. However, I still decided to do a refresh (what was I thinking?). I made an online backup of my world, and after I reinstalled Minecraft on my computer, I downloaded my world files. Unfortunately the backup (it appears) only saved what the world looked like when it was originally created. So all of my work is gone. I'm going to try and determine whether or not I did something wrong when moving the world files into my save folder under .minecraft.