I’m sad to hear that you lost your work.
But at least here lies a chance to learn a new habit that you must internalize into your workflow and make it a part of your inner self, constantly create backup copies of the work you are at.
Krita offers already measures to help the users with this, but unfortunately most don’t think about the fact that even in the year 2026 things can go wrong. Since the invention of data carriers, there exists one rule: “Make backup copies of your work!”, and as an amendment there exists the rule: “You can never have enough backups!”. In Krita’s menu File you find two options made for quickly creating a safety cushion, you must check them out to find out which suits you more, these are File > Save Incremental Backup F4 and File > Save Incremental Version CTRL ALT S. If you hit one of the shortcuts every 10 or 20 minutes, then you can not lose more than that amount of work, when you additionally set Settings > Configure Krita > General in the tab File Handling the setting Number of Backup Files Kept to 5 or 6, then this will very slowly create a second cushion each time you save your work.
Alternatively, there exists a plugin Oughtasave Plugin - An Autosave Replacement which will automatically create backups, but since I never tested it, I can not tell anything about it.
In both cases you should hold these backups as long as possible, and if you should have issues with disk space, you should hold at least the last backup of a day for the last seven days, but always check the backup you want to hold, not that you hold a backup that is corrupted for whatever reason. I never deleted my backups before I finished a work, and even then I hold some of them.
Michelist