Premiere Crash on Export, HOURS of saved work vanished, need help finding

Question

I have been working on a huge project for the past couple days. I've been saving on top of auto save on my own anally every five minutes.
Trial went up mid project and I had to upgrade to full creative CC package, in doing so Adobe gave me a new version of premiere not compatible of single App version I was working on with project before. So after the purchase when I went to open my project, it would prompt me and alert me of this difference, letting me know that my project is only compatible in a different version of premiere. I figured for this project, no big.
I FINALLY got the perfect cut, saved, went to export and my system locked up. I left it idle for a hour or so, came back and still frozen. I decided to reboot because there was no coming out of it.
Really freaking out over here, I will owe anyone my life who can try and help me figure out how to recover that final saved project file. No versions near the latest can be found in the obvious places to look.
I'm no file-saving-backup-techno genius. Please. SOS.

Answer 1

I share your feeling. Ppro inspires itself to crash at random intervals for no apparent reason and has done so for me since day one. I've spent the better part of 8 embittered years with the Ppro system, not a single version ever yielded reasonable stability.
In fact I just lost about an hour's work a moment ago after a freeze while simply scrubbing through a timeline. Not a single autosave file created since this afternoon.
I hear responses that are equal parts "works fine for me" and "I too live a tortured existence" and while Adobe engineers have been nothing but enthusiastic, patient, and helpful, the software remains an incredibly fragile and fickle ordeal. I've been left with the frustrating impression that the program is a patchwork quilt of functionality constructed piecemeal to keep pace with our ever-evolving needs, and bugs specific to certain hardware and software configurations inevitably multiply with them. Regardless of others' success, I believe that if a stool has two legs, it doesn't have to fall over to be considered unstable.
So as not to be a totally useless grumpy lubber, I would suggest doing what the Adobe engineers would tell you first, which would be to trash your preferences and clear your Cache folder. It won't bring back your work, but sometimes those files get corrupted and can choke your system again in the future.