garageband 10.4.8

i've been using garageband on my macbook for voiceover and podcast editing since the late-aughts. i habitually save my work while editing. however, recently, when i close the app and come back to a project a few days later, it might reload a random older version of the file i was working on. it has happened to me a few times over the past couple weeks. that's hours of work down the drain! in particular, i am losing automation and EQ. in at least one instance, i also lost content edits. it's incredibly annoying.

is this happening to anyone else? is there any way to recover whatever temporary files that might have that data in them? is there any setting in the app that i can change that might minimize the likelihood of this continuing to happen or save temp files for retrieval if necessary?