Strange behavior in relinking clips

Ok, I'm throwing this out there more to poke at my own brain than to resolve the issue (I've given up on that).

I was working on a project when I inadvertently deleted original clips. The problem was stemming from me not copying the clips when I imported; I was running low on disk space and thought the clips were duplicates, sent the to the trash and presto, I screwed myself up (the short of it I broke form my usual workflow because of an SD Card import issue discussed in another thread).

When I saw the broken clips, I quickly went to my backup and brought the original file back - and this is where I might have made my noob mistake - into my event's "Original Media" folder instead of the first folder the clips were referencing. Of course that didn't fix the link but I went to the relink function to simply re-point the project to these files.

Well, by some strange alchemy I'm yet to figure out, when I relinked the files in the relink window, it permanently deleted my clips!! No clue why! It just said "relink successful" or whatever, shut the window and the clips were literally gone from the "Original Media" folder...

I was never able to recover them. And now they are long gone.

And if you followed this whole post, when I said 'broke form my usual workflow' that also means that, like a dumdum I forgot to COPY from my backup, instead of MOVING from it........ that's my mistake and I'll live with it, but this behavior still completely threw me off and I was wondering if it's from my own doing.

Thanks!