I wanted to free up space on my mac air and I read here that removing the sleepimage files does no harm. So I deleted the private folder using omnikeeper. When I restarted, it's stuck with the grey screen. Pls help!

Hello, I'm using a macbook air mid-2012 with 4gb ram and 64gb ssd. I was freeing up space and decided to delete the sleepimage / private folder. I was using itunes (currently backing up my iphone 5s) but it prompted that the iphone is no longer connected to the computer. That was right after I deleted the sleepimage files. Before that, it was backing up but was discontinued due to lack of disk space.

My mac was working properly until I restarted it. It's stuck with the grey screen and the apple logo for more than 30 minutes... I restarted the computer for a few times, nothing changed.

Can I still recover my files? Or can I system restore?

Please help! 😟 Thank you so much!