problems with editing

Today, I took on the ful responsibilty of editing the film opening on my own. Im not very familiar with the program that we was using, which was final cut express, so I just experimented with new techniques.
Previously, the credits at the beginning have been edited and transitions have been put in that help the program fade in and out. Yet, there was a problem with one of the transitions, it was different to all the others, even if they had the same settings. This meant that I had to delete this credit and redo it. At first it was hard to get the hang of this, but I was able to do it in the end! After this was edited in, this is where the problem striked, all the other credits had dissapeared, and I had saved the work just after this, which means their gone completely.
Now they have to be done all over again, which could be good so we have a reason to do more work to the credits and make them even better.
This problem didnt help us keep calm becuase it meant that we went back a step and have more work to do, at this point the stress was beginning to kick in, in order to make the deadline.