Vim disaster

I had a 20,000 line file on my Windows 10 Vim
I saved my work but after a Windows crash I restarted and when I tried to edit that file it was reduced to a single line entirely filled with ^@^@^@^@^@ etc
Can anyone please help me solve this? I googled it but it wasn't much help. Especially the 20000+ lines now reduced to 1 line but the file size is still the same...Thank you!

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