Hi city-surgery,

There are two things you need to know:

First, saving incrementally and autosaving might help here.

But, as long as the Ai file is linked, it will read its current state when opening it. So, if any changes happen to the Ai file, that might show.

Since this is hard to reproduce, I don't ask for a file.

But safe incremental (Illustrator and Cinema4D). It might be beneficial at one point.

All the best