I feel your pain man. Been there. I lost a characters gear who was I think at fully upgraded silver armor the same way. Actually it was totally my fault for shutting down my server before the next autosave, but at that point me and my brother were somewhere around Day 900 (currently at Day 1200+, we stopped there mainly because our base became so big that my FPS tanks to like 17fps within our town, and that's on high end hardware).

Anyways, don't let it stop you from jumping back in