Project bins all gone after crash

I never saw the info panel before and found that the small blue icon at the top switched me to the Projecct Panel.  I don't know how I get to the info panel in the first place.  Clicking on whatever sometimes works.  Everything is back where it belongs. 

Thanks. Diana

Thanks, Jeff, Ann, and MM.

I can't really flag a "correct answer" yet until I  better understand what's going wrong.  All I know now is that, for whatever reason, I can't rely on my software to run properly, or even to hold on to the most basic of files, nor to give me a clear and easy way to step back 10 minutes in time and use a previous version of the sequences that crashed.  Saving files manually is a good practice, but I would like to have a system that did not rely on me to do special saves every 10 minutes, because to be honest, that's not likely to happen on a regular basis, no matter how many ribbons I tie around my finger.  And even if I consistently do it, I'm likely to forget when it most matters.

The first thing I did when I went freelance with my video-related job was to hire a programmer to create a program that would backup my job-related text files every two minutes (AND KEEP ALL THE BACKUPS) -- since it was not unusual for me as a salaried employee to lose an hour or more worth of work due to my former company's dodgy backup system. I have worked freelance for four years now and never had to redo more than 5 minutes of lost freelance work.

Perhaps I'll have to do the same thing for Premiere Pro: get a programmer to write Perl code (or whatever) to make sure that my project files are indisputably backed up every five minutes or so -- in a place where I can find them and be sure that they'll be there.

Now is the time to check your autosave settings. Set it to keep 5-10 versions, and set your auto-save interval to something you think is good. I personally use 5-7 minutes but everyone does what they think is best.