After Effects continuously stops auto saving progress, won't manually save either

I’m on a MacBook Pro 2023

Apple m3 pro chip

18 gbs RAM (… the minimum rec)

1 tb SSD 

Sonoma 14.5

Basically… I will be working along, auto save will periodically pop up, and then sometimes I’ll see that there hasn’t actually been a save in hours. Other times application memory warning will pop up at almost 110 gbs and the app will stop responding. I close out, clear cache, mess with settings, uninstall, reinstall, nothing seems to solve this frustrating problem. I lost a whole day of progress today, even when I swore it saved earlier. The auto-save folder will say the time of the most recent save, but when I open it there is no save file with a corresponding time of save. It’s just so bizarre I can’t seem to find much on forums about this. I'm not doing anything that i thought was too intensive, besides basic layer compositing.