I'm fairly new to Inkscape, so apologies if this is an obvious question.

So up until recently i had been making use of the layers tab to sort all of the path and objects i was working with.
Now I did 'something' to cause all of the paths that were previously listed in the dock to vanish and i have no idea how to get them back.

Right now all i have are the layers themselves, which i can hide, and doing so hides all paths and objects in that layer. I don't see the individual paths themselves.

So any help is really appreciated

I'd use the "Objects" panel (dialog).

Sorry, how to i get the objects dialog? I press Ctrl-Shift-O but that brings up the objects properties dialog.

Object > Objects

(Object menu > Objects)

I suppose we should wait to hear what happens when Lim3zer0 opens the Objects dialog. But I can't quite imagine how he or she was seeing individual objects or paths in the Layers dialog. I wonder if he or she might have already been using Objects dialog?

Did the objects and paths disappear from both the dialog and the canvas? Or just the canvas? If you have all the layers visible (including sub-layers), and you don't see them on the canvas, then we may have a bit of a chore, and there's a chance they've been deleted. But let's try to find them.

Do you remember which layer they were supposed to be in? If you remember what layer they were in before, then I would start this way:

-- hide all the other layers
-- make sure that layer is both visible and activated (selected, or highlighted)
-- deselect everything on the canvas
-- Ctrl A (this will select everything in that layer, even if it has become transparent)

If you see that there are some bounding boxes (the dashed line rectangles that you see around something when it is selected) which are empty, then it would seem the paths and objects are still there, but transparent. Do you know how to make them opaque again, or do you need help? I'm not sure about your skill level.

If you don't find them that way, then I would ask you to try and remember what you were doing around the time they disappeared. Were you moving any objects from one layer to another? Perhaps they were inadvertently moved to a different layer?

Or were you dragging and dropping things inside the Layers or Objects dialog? If so, you might have inadvertently moved them to a different layer. Or you might have switched some layers so that they became sub-layers. If that happened, you should notice a tiny plus sign just to the left of a layer name, where if you click on it, it will expand that layer, and let you see sub-layers. Depending on your mouse skills, that could even happen by accident. I sometimes have involuntary muscle twitches, and I accidentally move something, or move it too far, or to the wrong place.

If you were using the Objects dialog in the first place, you don't happen to remember the object or path's id, do you? "path1234" or "group1234" If you happen to remember those numbers, you could find them with the Edit menu > Find/Replace, no matter where they might have been moved to. Or if they aren't found that way, then you know they've been deleted. But you'd have to be certain about the id number, for that to work.

While you work on that, I'll try and think of some other ideas. But definitely let us know what happens.