Square Enix has made the Return Home to Vana'Diel campaign a permanent feature, I believe. This allows you to recover any character as long as you did not manually delete it.

As far as whether or not you should utilize that feature, it's entirely up to you. It's hard to say if you'll lose any considerable progress without knowing what exactly you accomplished on the character you're able to recover. Given that you said you only played for two weeks, I doubt it will be anything substantial. If you'd prefer to play as an Elvaan, I'd say go ahead and do that instead.

That said I'm not entirely sure I'd endorse returning to Final Fantasy XI to start--relatively--from scratch. At this point in the game's life-cycle, a majority of the players are high level. Level Sync helps compensate for the lack of low level and mid level parties, but finding support to accomplish a number of missions and similar activities is becoming increasingly difficult. Also, with the announcement of Final Fantasy XIV, there's not likely to be a significant influx of new players. On top of that, I imagine as soon as FFXIV's beta is released, you'll start noticing a significant decrease in activity in FFXI.

As much as I love the game, I really don't think it's a good time to get started. FFXI has always had trouble being newbie friendly, and despite recent changes that make the early levels significantly less brutal than they used to be, the other changes to the population act as an unfortunate counter-balance. My personal opinion is that your best bet is just to wait and see if FFXIV interests you.