I feel your pain.

I was working on an illuminated celtic knotwork manuscript page (16x22 or thereabouts within the borders) with a lot of fine detail. I had the black and white work done, and I was about 1/3 done colouring it. I would guess I had put about 12 months of work into it at that point, on and off. Then my cat knocked over a glass of water on my table. oh, did i mention it was done on paper? No save, no backup, no undo. The inks were SUPPOSED to be colourfast/indelible/whatever it's called.. waterproof. Nope, they ran. the whole piece was destroyed. I haven't done any celtic art since, except for a few minor doodles. The way my wife describes my reaction is along the lines of "it broke your spirit".

I was able to scan the whole thing in and clean it up so it was B+W linework (and even messed around a bit with colouring in photoshop), but I never did get back to redoing it on paper. And then it was.. about 8 years before I took up any serious art of any sort (yay maps!).

Look on the bright side - you'll never forget "save early save often" again