Are you moving to a new project all together? or will you attempt to redo the missing assets? I have a few people I could probably throw your way who are looking to make models but they are by far nothing of industry grade or level. Could be of use to you though.

The best of a failure is always the experience you take with you, but you need to accept the experience and don't wave it aside as unfortunate events.

Even with multiple copies and backup the game as it was is a shell.

I do not want to sound rude, but this is a clear sign of unorganised project handling, you should rethink your approach (team up => kickstart to get money) in such a situation.

Maybe it would be a good idea to take the surviving team, even cutting off some teammembers to form a core team, and prototype a little game project in a given timebox (3-6 month). Build the prototype as throwaway prototype, just to evaluate your own skills, estimations and to form a good working team.

A good working team will slice through development like butter, and much better then a larger, though unexperienced, team. You might come to the conclusion, that it will not work out and you need more experiences (in this case you have saved you and your team some horrible headache and given them some pretty valuable experiences) or you feel that it will work out (in this case your experiences and team spirit will speed up the development of a next project). In both cases it is a win-win.

Ashaman brings up some good points. I know that we have had to redo many things in the past because we just did not have the experience needed to do what we wanted. Organization became my job and has been since that point. With the purchase of some tracking software and weekly meetings we have increased our productivity 10 times what we use to do. Oddly, it doesnt seem that way since we are now taking on bigger tasks! :P

It is true that the game assets that were lost were sub par materials and that their lose my end up being a good thing. Still it hurts to lose something that ate so much time.