There is a way you can save your progress when in CAS. There is an option to save the household to your library. So as you edit the family, just save them to your library every now and then. So if the game crashes like it did for you, you can save a good part of your work.
When you create a family from scratch for the 1st time, CAS will automatically save a copy of the household to your library before it goes back to the game when you exit. You always get a popup when that happens too. That does not happen if you are editing a household that is already in the game. So if the family was a new one, you might have gotten lucky and the family got saved to your library and you didn't lose your time and effort.
Hope this helps.
