vc killed my work

Subject says all. ,---- | XEmacs 21.2 (beta44) "Thalia" [Lucid] (i686-pc-linux) of Mon Feb 12 | 2001 on radioactive.socha.net | | vc version 1.23 `---- I'm editing a 140 page text with Tibetan, Chinese and all other sorts of complicated stuff in LaTeXe. I'm sending this to -bete because it's *never* failed before. I said: ,---- | C-x C-q runs `vc-toggle-read-only' | | `vc-toggle-read-only' is an interactive compiled Lisp function | -- loaded from "vc-hooks" | (vc-toggle-read-only &optional VERBOSE) | `---- I got: % $Id: introduction.tex,v 1.1 2001/01/25 19:25:25 robin Exp $ Well, fine. I also got: ,---- | Preface | | This book wants to describe various ``indigenous'' grammatical traditions | across the globe in a culture-contrastive anthropological linguistic | perspective. It asks questions such as What did people in culture or `---- You guessed correctly. This used to be \chapter{Preface}... VC nuked the entire buffer and reverted it to the previous (Text converted from HTML) version. I feel slightly unnerved after 49h of hacking this thing. It's *ALL* gone. Nothing in the backups. Any ideas? I'll take goats, virgins and everything else as long as I don't have to do this again. Deadline looming. Robin dead. HELP! -- Robin S. Socha <http://socha.net/>