Hello,
Sorry to hear about the loss of data in your students project. R console history or unsaved file changes can be lost when a R session crashes. Some users have had luck recovering this type of data using this package: https://github.com/jmcphers/rsrecovr
If not can you provide some more specifics about the data that was lost? If these are files saved to disk an idea of which and how files were modified, when they were modified, and when they went missing could facilitate debugging the issue on our end.
Thank you and your student for your patience,
Sean