EMBRILLIANCE: Your working file turns into just a stitch file

If you open your .be file and your OBJECTS have been BLOWN AWAY and the .be contains stitches only here is how that can happen. With Essentials/Enthusiast, this can happen to your Letters objects. With Stitch Artist, this can happen to some/all of your objects.
If you did a color stop in stitch simulator or went into enthusiast and did any stitch editing or if you did color sort and viewed the file and then saved it with the same name or opened the stitch file and saved it with the same name, then yes, you lost your ability to edit the objects. Any of those will take the stitches and overwrite the defined object. Typically if you are using color stop or Enthusiast lasso on an element that was already stitches only, then that one object of your .be file will be successfully edited, since it was just stitches, and it will not break your other objects. If you color sort or lasso any Letters objects or SA objects, those objects will be converted to stitches, and you will no longer be able to edit those objects. Also, if you do a color sort and save it over the top of your .be file, you will lose the original .be file and its editable objects.Be sure to save your file as a separate version before doing stitch edit changes and when saving a color sort – Never save it with the same name as the original – appended “sorted” to file name or some other distinguisher, to prevent overwriting your working .be file with an uneditable Stitches Only version.