Some things never change

There is a way to retrieve a project when this happens but it requires doing incremental saves either by using auto save or manually saving. I wouldn't go 4 or 5 minutes without saving. Why on earth would you go 45 minutes without saving. Sorry but going Ctrl + S isn't very hard to do.

If you don't value your efforts enough to save them regularly then I'm sure nothing I can say or do will make you develop those good habits. No point in blaming Sonar or Windows for that matter. You had 45 minutes to save your work 10 or more times. Sorry I'm not sympathetic. The important thing is for you to learn the lesson to save your work. Regularly and in smal. Increments.

I MUST PRESS Ctrl + S regularly.

John T
I've talked about this before on here, but there's no good reason to have auto-save switched off. Whenever you talk to people about why they do have it switched off, they (mostly) have one of two reasons, both of which are based on a misapprehension:
 
1/ I don't want recording / playback interrupted by a save
This doesn't happen. Sonar will never auto save during recording or playback, no matter what the auto-save settings.
Interestingly, though, you can manually save during playback, and I've never had that cause any issues.
 
2/ I don't want Auto-Save to overwrite my project.
 
It doesn't. It creates a new file called "auto-save of xxxxxxxx.cwp". And you can generally ignore these files unless you need to recover after a crash.
 
There is a third reason not to use auto-save which is a good one. On very complex projects, the save can get slow enough to be a bit of an interruption to working. But if you're not having that problem, there's no other reason not to have it switched on.
 
So I think in answer to the OP's question: "Will Sonar/Windows EVER develop a way to be able to retrieve a project when this happens?", I'd say Sonar has developed a way, and it's Auto-Save. It's not perfect, but on the other hand, I haven't lost more than five minutes' work in literally years. I think it's almost a decade since this was last an issue for me.

 
Exactly this ^^^^

The two rules of data.

Anything not saved does not exist. It is a temporary illusion that can disappear in a millisecond.

Anything saved on only one medium and not backed up onto at least one other different drive (not partition on the same drive but an entirely different drive) exits but only temporarily. It is here today but may not be here tomorrow.

Years ago I worked with someone who one morning came into the office in a frantic state of mind. Her MA thesis was due in next week and her laptop's drive which contained the thesis and all her notes and data had just failed, to the extent BIOS didn't recognise it.

She could, of course, have simply reloaded her most recent backup and continued working on her old desktop PC. But there weren't any backups because, as she explained, she was just "far too busy" and "didn't have the time to waste" setting up automatic backups or even just copying stuff to an external drive.

So she sent a panicked email to her MA supervisor and packed the laptop off to the manufacturer to see if things could be fixed. The manufacturer lost the computer.....

So the OP should change his title to
 
Some people never change
 
??

Hmm, yeah. That's the drawback. It can be slow for certain kinds of projects.
 
Cutting a long story short, what makes project files big - and therefore slow to save - is data density.
 
So one thing is heavy editing of clips, creating lots of small clips. Another is MIDI data intensive projects, meaning lots of note date.
 
I'm always doing lots of different kinds of work, and I've really started to notice the distinction. When I'm doing mixing of projects that have come to me all as WAV files, the auto-save is unnoticable. At the other extreme, when I'm working on editing audiobooks in 1-2 hour chunks, even with a single mono track, once you're at the level of editing breaths out, you're generating thousands upon thousands of clips, and the project files start to get big and slow to save. Projects with lots of midi data sit somewhere in the middle.
 
It would be nice if the save process could become more optimal. I suspect this is a hard computer science problem rather than anything Sonar or Windows-specific though.

I've never lost anything to Sonar and normally I don't turn on auto save unless I'm working with a client or live band. Then it's easy to be busy and forget to save. On my own I'm like the rest and save after every worthwhile change has been made..End of day before I shut down I back up to a second drive. Hard drives are so cheap compaired to other gear. I still have every hard drive I ever owned minus a few that died. 
I even have a box of floppy disks!!! 

Most of us have learned through painful scar tissue, to make SURE that we back up quite frequently.
 
I too am in the camp of manual saving, and like bitflipper, I do it both before and after any significant edit or operation in a project, as well as for any AHA moments.
 
I also make sure that any project where I have done a single edit in the current session, and it is open - and I step away, even just to run out for lunch, that I close the session and save the project folder to an external backup drive, so that if the hard drive should fail while I am at lunch, I still have the work saved off to somewhere I can recover it from.
 
I spent over 20 years in mainframe technical support, and we learned VERY early into it all to always make sure you have backups, both local and offsite, of any data that is critical, PERIOD.  We actually had a case where we had a major power failure that also took out the backup power systems, and the instant heat melted down some of the mainframe's solder, and needless to say it took lots of stuff with it.  Well, turns out a set of the backup tapes were physically damaged too, so we turned to our offsite backups and were able to piece things together from a week prior, and then apply all logged transactions in a forward recovery operation to get all but the data that was literally in-flight at the moment the power had gotten cut.  That data would have been lost forever, were it not for redundant backups.
 
Save, Save, Save, Save, Save, Save, Save.  It IS a mindset.
 
Bob Bone