cannot save my project

I keep having this issue where I am working and an auto-save box pops up but it just sits there and never makes progress.  Seems to hang indefinitely.  if I cancel that and try and save the project manually the same thing happens.  at this point my project is not saving and nor is it auto-saving.  when I look at my auto-saves there are no recent autosaves either, meaning I have been working a while, usually an hour or more with no saves and have no way of saving this progress.  I also cannot "save as" and if I duplicate or make a copy of the project in my production it actually makes a copy of the old state of the project so still not saving new work.  Help!  what can I do?  is something corrupt? reset settings?