Painted and saved my original image in error

[Tiny Pixie]

Complete newbie here - so hello to all and please be patient with me.

I've followed some guides to remove the background from portraits starting with, opening it in gimp 2.10, adding an alpha channel and then duplicating the layer.

Several hours and saves later(!), I realised that the original image had various brush strokes on it which I did without realising. If I use the eraser, it removes all the image layers, not just the paint. Hope this all makes sense.

Is there a way to return the original image back to how it was, without the brush-strokes?

With luck, it's just something simple... Thank you.

[Ofnuts]

The Erase tool only acts on one layer at a time so I don't really understand "f I use the eraser, it removes all the image layers". Since you duplicated the layer, with some luck you didn't paint on the initial layer. Make all layers invisible except the bottom one in the Layers list (click the eye icon) and see if the paint strokes are still visible.

Also, in Gimp you "save" your image to XCF, and "export" to other formats. Did you export over the initial image? If not you still have the unchanged image.