working w/word 2003, win xp

i save my work religiously, probably ever two minutes. so why when i turned
on my computer is half the document i was writing yesterday gone? when i
opeend word, there was a corrupt file error message, then it could not
retrieve it.

would part of a file be corrupted so only a portion was missing. obviously
it's very frustrating losing hours of work, when i'm always so careful to
save. even more nervous making is how to avoid this from happening in the
future.

i looked to see if somehow the file was someplace else or a different name
by doing a word search, but came up empty.