Especially if you're using only a .bib database, you don't want those long hours spent creating and managing your citations to disappear. Here's a list of tools you can use to make something this bad less likely to happen.

Yale University now has a subscription to Overleaf, which provides a Google Docs-like experience for people writing in LaTeX. Here's some stuff you need to know:

To connect your account with Yale's license, log in with your Yale email address and password. You should also be able to change your email address if you signed up with a personal account.

These guides are broken into general resources, followed by resources specifically for BibTeX, natbib, and biblatex + biber.

Here are links to some software that will be helpful to you when working in LaTeX. While you can run LaTeX from the command line, many text editors also exist.