If you want your particles to be reliable, you need to manually bake them in the cache settings. The cache you get when playing the simulation in the viewport is just an unreliable preview and it can get deleted or do weird stuff at any time.
Also for in the future what can happen. Even of you bake it can go wrong when you have “persistant data” function on in the performance tab of the render settings. Its a amazing function that saves allot of time with animations but if you have simulations it can mess things up. Even without simulations it can. But if it works it can save allot of time