Deletion of .frm .MYD .MYI files On my server I had files from 2012, 2013, ... 2016 which were .frm, .MYD, .MYI. I deleted files which were older than 180 days. I left the files from this year only.

Three days later database was gone and phpMyAdmin showed:


  #2002 - The server is not responding (or the local MySQL server's socket is not correctly configured)


Could deletion of these old MySQL files have been the problem here?
Well I guess you just deleted the database's data files (.myd) and the database's index files (.myi) from your database server. To top it off you deleted the *.frm file which are also part of your database.

One reference I came across: Normalize Table File Name Extensions
Another reference describes what you did manually: What happens when you drop your database
The full reference can be found here: MySQL Glossary

I do hope you have a backup of your database?