# Accidentally removed environment and I can't recreate it

**URL:** <https://forum.anaconda.com/t/accidentally-removed-environment-and-i-cant-recreate-it/96686>\
**Category:** Packages & Environments\
**Created:** [July 20, 2025, 11:59am UTC](https://forum.anaconda.com/t/accidentally-removed-environment-and-i-cant-recreate-it/96686 "2025-07-20T11:59:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![aglobalnomad](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/anaconda/user_avatar/forum.anaconda.com/aglobalnomad/32/6313_2.png) [@aglobalnomad](https://forum.anaconda.com/u/aglobalnomad)\
**Post date:** [July 20, 2025, 11:59am UTC](https://forum.anaconda.com/t/accidentally-removed-environment-and-i-cant-recreate-it/96686/1 "2025-07-20T11:59:42Z")

</div>

I’ve taken a several year hiatus on my python learning but recently I decided to fix a project I had started awhile back.

I was trying to manage my environments in Anaconda Navigator (it’s old, v2.3.2 - and I’ve been having issues getting it to update and have tried many threads). It listed two environments (in addition to others I have): one ‘quickCue’ and the other ‘quickCUE’. I knew that my project was using the ‘quickCUE’ environment, so I decided to delete the quickCue environment to avoid confusion going forward. After hitting “Remove”, Anaconda deleted **both environments**.

No, I didn’t have any backups.

Then, I was trying to recreate the environment and clicked Create, and typed quickCUE. But there’s no new environment being created and the log viewer shows:

```auto
raise CondaEnvExistsError(f'Conda environment {ref} already exists')

```

I do see a folder named quickCUE in `C:\Users\Me\Anaconda3\envs\`, but it just contains a few .conda\_trash files in subfolders.

Can I safely delete this folder and try recreating the environment again? I had just finished fixing my program and was going to try to install pyinstaller to make an executable…

(And yes, I plan to update everything, conda, python, etc., but only after I make my executable because I don’t want to hassle with fixing dependencies etc. until I have a working executable.)