Spotlight comments disappeared

I have a folder containing close to 300 aliases to other files in another folder. I added "Spotlight Comments" to most of them. Everything seemed to work for a long time. Recently, I cut and paste some long description text to the comment field in the info of the aliases. All of a sudden, all the comments in the folder disappeared. Other folders are fine.

Did I cross the line somewhere and exceeded certain limit and corrupted some kind of database file for the folder? Can I recovered those comments because they consist of work that spanned over almost two years.