Other components would survive the crash. The programming editor could crash, resulting in the possible loss of work for any window in the editor that wasn't saved.
Sometimes it can be useful not to save after a download, so that you can quickly revert back to the last saved version. With the classic Step 7 5.x you always had the option of saving each window individually.
(I will update this post regularly.) First things first: back up often This is valid for version 13 service pack 1 update 9 (June 2016) but some of these issues have been present in earlier versions. Overall, it has been improving steadily with each new version but there are still a few pesky issues that can be a bother. It is vastly different from the 5.x version and it took me time to get used to. Totally Integrated Automation (TIA) is the current Siemens engineering framework for automation.