Sorry that happened as well. This observation probably doesn't help much, but I suspect the habit of backing things up somehow and at least somewhat regularly comes more naturally to those of us who lost days, weeks, or more of work/school product and had to re-create it all back when systems and even network servers were so much less reliable than they are today. I ran into this kind of thing while working on a huge user manual spanning many chapters decades ago and don't think I ever did manage to remember and re-create all of the random changes I had made for a few days while jumping around what was at time the current version that got lost.
Our games, sims, and content stores are like really big spreadsheets/databases, except with lots of moving parts, and those of us who have gone through the pain of lost data way in the past might be more likely to protect what we have created once we stop and think about how painful it might be to suddenly lose it all. It's a really difficult lesson to learn the hard way, though. :/