deleted a chunk of my work the other day by pressing Ctrl z in windows explorer. my project was without source control installed (cuz it was in Dev stage), and Ctrl shit z/Ctrl y hotkeys didn't work, so that chunk was just gone, persished forever...
or so I though. I remembered vs code having a file history under some panel. found it, and here it was - at least some of the latest history of my file.
lesson learned: even in Dev where nothing is yet working, finish your day of coding with a commit to a remote repo.
Yeah, standard practice is to set up source control before doing any work at all. Then you add whatever project template/scaffolding files to an initial commit and make it, and keep committing from there.
You should always be committing early and often. Saves you a lot of headache and make it a lot easier to clean up your history later too.