Poof! All media gone no idea why or how

[docmaas]

Since coming to visit in LA I've been unable to upload new media due to the vlc setting under network being autoset to one of my two iphones. At home it always used the same ip (on xfinity) as my macbook pro and opened download app on the macbook that transferred files to the phone. In the process of trying to find a way to set the ip to the one in use here I've been unable to figure out how to configure it. Today I walked out to get closer to the router to see if that would help. It didn't and in the process I decided to reboot the phone to see if it would grab the local address instead of the iphone address. That didn't work but when I went to watch some media I found the media had been wiped clean. I have no idea why nor where to recover the deleted files. I saw one other report of something similar but no resolution. Any help would be appreciated.

Mike