AE crashed and destroyed my project

Not a request for help, just a rant. AE freezes when trying to re-open the project I was working on or importing it into a new one. All the assets are available. Do I have a backup? No, I hadn't finished working with the file, yet. And no, deleting preferences has no effect. Yes, it's the latest edition. I guess I have to treat AE the way I used to treat Quark XPress: save under a new file name every 15 minutes.