Thanks for the help, but I think I might just start a new save at that rate. Fixing my factories to be able to work with the new sciences would break them completely.

I understand that I didn't back up the file and it was a major mistake on my part, but that doesn't help me at all with knowing if its possible to restore/recover the file.

I upgraded my game to the latest experimental branch via the beta tab of steam and loaded my world. I didn't like the new update as it changed some recipes for science and decided to downgrade my world back to 0.16.51, but in that time all my autosaves saved and I made the mistake of saving my world ...