Six hours down the drain... Any way to prevent this in the future besides the obvious?

Just a tip: Sometimes a "Stopped responding" warning will pop up when you save. I get it quite often, but it does (usually) go away if I wait it out. You should still save more often, but really if it does pop up, let it sit for 5-10 minutes and see if it goes away. When I get said message, I usually see it disappear after 2-5 minutes. It seems to be caused by clicking your mouse in the program while it's attempting to save. I guess the program is just trying to process so much information at once that windows thinks it froze.