You may be on "Online Mode" then. Go ahead a click on the top right of the screen that says "Go Offline" and your character will appear. You are not able to make your offline character an online one, I assume that's to avoid cheaters. If you don't have any friends to play with (not a bad thing) I would just stay offline to avoid the server lag or current bugs causing stuff to disappear.

I am definitely in the offline mode none of my current offline characters are shown in any files

That is strange. Have you had any crashes, uninstalled and/or reinstalled, restarted your computer, or anything else like that since last playing? Maybe something got caught up in the game files or something that made it do a wipe. Surely annoying that things like this can happen, especially in offline mode. I hope they will fix that soon. Just try to restart pc and see if they show back up again I suppose.

I found out it is actually only showing my beta prelaunch stuff in the files is there a way to update these files at all?

Only thing I can think of trying is reinstalling the game to reset the files, verify integrity (if you are on steam), and check the game for updates, possibly a hotfix has fixed it (there was one last night). That doesn't seem right that it would reroll you back on the offline mode.

tried that and my characters are still not appearing and now savegames is no longer a folder :(