Turns out I didn't lose my character afterall, logged into same server today to check and my character was back and just 20ft further back down the road from when server crashed.

Will try and login again tomorrow and see if it might have been something to do with the server I switched to. Maybe it wasn't connected to the hive, I panicked a little and quickly logged out and turned it off in the hope that my other character might reappear and new spawn didn't overwrite my main character.

My first time playing DayZ today and managed a couple of hours and was having a great time. Then server I was on restarted and then seemed to crash and hang on the restart, I exited and joined another server and came back as a new spawn. Quickly exited again and shut game down but haven't been back on since but I think my character is gone too.