I've seen a lot of "my file is corrupted" threads recently, and thought I would jot down some methods to avoid this. Now, this won't stop them from happening, but it will at least let you recover your work.

1) Save in .ma
The ma format stands for "Maya ASCII". It is a plain-text file that contains all of your scene information. While it has the downside of producing large file sizes than the default mb (Maya Binary), it has the plus-side of being recoverable. If there is a corruption somewhere, you can open up the file in a text editor, and, providing you have a good grasp of MEL, you will likely be able to fix it; or at least recover parts of it. The binary format, as I said, is smaller, but is not human-readable, and therefore extremely difficult to fix.

2) Turn on incremental save
Turning on incremental save is another easy way to prevent data corruption. It simply saves a numbered copy of your scene file whenever you save. Therefore, if you find your latest scene has become corrupted, you can simply open up the incrementalSave folder, and pick out the latest one. You can turn this on in the save option box.

3) Avoid third-party nodes if possible
Have third party nodes in your scene can be a potential hazard, as they may be coded improperly. This can cause stability issues, and can be hard to pinpoint when the program crashes.

I hope these easy steps help people avoid the loss of their hard work.

Please feel free to PM me if you have any more tips.