I posted to the Krita subreddit already and haven't gotten an answer so far, so I'm going to post here too and see if I can get an answer. I really don't want to redo any of this ;v;

I was drawing some fanart on Krita when it crashed as I was messing around with my docker settings. I already had a save in place, but that was from *way* earlier in my work and I had just forgotten to save recently. Luckily, it made an autosave. But for some reason, when I exited out and tried to start back where I left off ( yes I forgot to save again my mom kept calling me to do stuff ;_; ), it can no longer find the autosave despite me seeing it in my folders as a .kra~ file. It says that the file doesn't exist. I'm just wondering how I can get it back to where I can use it again, or if I have to start drawing from my older save.

If there still is a .kra~ file, rename it to something.kra and open it in Krita to see whether it's the right one. But if you start Krita, load a file that has an autosave, then tell Krita not to load the autosaved file, the autosave will be deleted and will be gone. See https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/autosave.html