so while i was drawing, krita crashed. i re-opened it and the auto-saved file replaced the lost one, which was a huge relief.
i then decided to take a break from working on the said drawing, saved and closed it, and when i opened krita to start on it, it wasn't there.
i've been searching through my files for it, but it's nowhere to be seen.
any help would be greatly appreciated

If you have saved the file, it's somewhere on your computer. Let the OS search for the filename. If it isn't there then, in fact, you did not save it.

You can share the contents of Help -> Show system information for bug reports. Just copy everything and paste to pastebin.com and share a link here. And tell us how this file was supposed to be named, too.