Can save files get corrupted randomly?

[Varnado]

This September, I spent many, many hours building up the largest city in my Prospect Bay region, saving it many times and reloading it without issue until one day a save apparently went bad and the entire city was lost: Every time I tried to reload the tile, and I tried dozens of times doing everything I could think of, the game would crash almost immediately. There was one way to prevent the crash, by immediately zooming in and panning the camera as soon as the loading screen disappeared, but as soon as I stopped panning advisor dialog boxes would appear and as soon as I had clicked through all of them, the postponed CTD would hit.

At first I thought this had to do with some recently installed plugin, or one of the lots I had just plopped. But through experimentation, I found that my plugins made no difference and I've successfully used every lot I plopped before that bad save in other cities without any kind of issue. In the end I could never figure out why my city would no longer load properly, so I restored a three month old backup and resolved to rebuild nearly from scratch.

Cut to today: I was working on a new city tile in another region for a few hours, and saving intermittently until suddenly about 20 minutes after a save I ran into a seemingly inexplicable crash while panning the camera. All I'd been doing was zoning (without running the simulator), building infrastructure and plopping landmarks that I've all used in many cities beforehand without issue. My game has been particularly unstable ever since a graphics driver update about a month ago, so I figured I'd chalk the crash up to that. But then when I tried to reload the tile, I ran into the same crashing problem I had with my city back in September! All the characteristics are the same, right down to being able to delay the crash by zooming and panning the camera. I was about ready to tear my hair out after the first couple times, especially when the fourth crash triggered a black screen of death.

I'm not ready to just accept that there's nothing I can do about this problem, at least not with some confirmation from some of the long time players here. So does this situation sound familiar? What could I be doing be doing wrong to cause this? How do I recover my save?